A wave of illiterate “home schooled” children

Unfortunately also learning to accept being bullied by people who don't like you very much.

And those at school who don't get the grades should be compensated by the education authority right?
Lots of children in schools will fail their GCSEs

Sadly most state schools don't have qualified and experienced teachers in each subject and this the socialisation of many peers includes dealing with very difficult behaviour.

The increase in home education has coincided with huge reduction in school funding and increasing issues in schools.

So schools can fail 55% of children (75% of disadvantaged children) and you're fine with that?

Doesn't sound like you care about education very much.

I would note that local authorities aren't routinely fined for "denying children an education" even though they do. In a small minority of cases parents are awarded a small amount of compensation, but in most cases, tumbleweed.

I would suggest that part of it is learning to get along with people you don't like very much.

I had a teacher friend who successfully home educated two of her children until they went to grammar school. Her DH was a GP. She could afford not to earn.

Even had I wanted to, or had the skills, I neded an income. Serious question, unless one parent can support the family, how can it be an affordable option?

We had one who removed her child to home school just before Easter one year and insisted on having all the exercise books to take home. Fair enough, except she turned up at the end of the summer term and demanded a written report!

Wrong, because as I said already, 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. And the parent who has denied their child an education, and whose child has failed to meet a minimum standard as a result, doesn't have to go to jail. They can pay a fine instead.

Currently there are zero consequences for denying a child an education. (By denying a child an education, I mean either a school career or an effective home education.) Yes, some parents do home ed very well, but what about all those who don't? You can take them out of school because you don't like the lunch menu, you can be unbothered about teaching them to read or making sure they pass any GCSEs, and there are no consequences. HOW is that fair to children? How is that allowed?

Parents who are feckless about education need consequences for it. I don't know why jail time or fines is so controversial. Currently those are the two punishments allowed for parents whose children are enrolled at school but don't make them go.

One of my daughter’s friends was a school refuser, social anxiety at the time, was bought her own small flat to live in, near her parents, only child and very indulged.

She was then home schooled, but was doing nothing, so the local council arranged for her to attend a local approved school, who picked her up by minibus, and took her to the new school.

On leaving school, her social anxiety disappeared and she ran her own shop.

I suspect the people who take their kids out of school for spurious reasons, risk this, and it would probably be better in the long run for their kids

That's what you said in your second post, not in your first.

Because they don’t want their children socialising with other children outside their church. I doubt they will go to medical school as one of the prerequisites these days is having some work experience in a health setting. If you don’t want your children spending time with non religious people it’s going to be quite hard. They do no extra curricular activities either. Maybe they’ll get good results but won’t have much to add on top.

About half a century ago, kids playing entirely unsupervised (including on building sites, railways, in rivers etc), playing roughly, teasing, fighting or even hurting animals was seen as par for the course.
Was it really a utopia of perfecr behaviour in the good old days? Borstals were pretty full.

That's nonsense. We all teach our children from the day they're born.

It's home educated, OP.
I have no problem with being called anti-establishment. The "vast majority" will never be likely to attempt home ed. Plenty of children leave school semi-literate. Plenty of children leave school traumatised by bullying. For sure, home ed is unsuitable for some. So is school.

I am sure we can all quote examples of homeschooling done badly, but the same applies to in-school education.

Just as most children do OK at school, so most home-schooled children also do OK.

For some chidlren school is torture; just as some poorly homeschooled children miss out.

There are huge flaws in our education system, not least the challenge of crowd control which can hold up the process of true education and be seriously frightening for some children. Some parents choose not to have their children go through this, and it is an entirely reasonable decision - and there is a lot of support available to home educate well.

I do take the point that it needs to be better monitored in order to weed out the minority of children for whom "home education" in practice means no education at all; and to deal with issues of child protection. But it is not right in principle to force every child to go to school just because some parents are abusive and having children in school means that this can be better identified. There have to be some freedoms left to parents.

I didn't call you prejudiced for insisting that children should go to school.

Home educated children are private candidates , so you would need to find the statistics for private candidates. However, this category also includes adults who are re-sitting exams, or never sat them. The government doesn't keep statistics for Home educated children, but it would be interesting if they did.

There's a difference also between being intelligent and being able to teach. Particularly to teach your own children. I know many people who are very well educated, PhD level and all that, but who can't get information over in a form that anyone else could understand, never mind learn from. So it's not just being educated yourself as a parent, it's being able to get that information over in a form in which your children can understand it (without everyone losing their temper), and your children actually wanting to sit down and listen to you for long enough to take it on board.

There is, it's called flexischooling.

As I said, I don't think it's the norm in the UK (reading fir comprehension!). But it does exist, and some parents are using the US 'Christian' curricula.

A lot of people homeschooling are actually critical of the low standards in school, some 40 percent of school leavers are not literate. The problems have been around since the 1970s when it became fashionable to be "progressive". Literacy is a huge problem in the UK. Behaviour in many schools is terrible - fights, abusive language, most children not engaged and making it impossible for other children to learn, petty punishments for minor misdemeanours affecting mental health of children at school generally. See numerous threads about English schools. It is a huge worry for parents.

So some might homeschool for the reasons you say but if I were able to home school it would be for the reasons I give above.

Hope you don't feel torn apart!

Who's being prosecuted over schooled children then? Only 45% got grade 5 in English and Maths, and only 25% of disadvanted children got them! The prisons would be overflowing 😂

Well, equally, what makes you think that homeschooled children do have proper resources? (To me, proper resources means qualified and experienced teachers in each subject and the socialisation of many peers.)

We would need to know how many homeschooled children achieve the maths stat in order to make a comparison.

Only in today's topsy-turvey world would someone be called prejudiced for insisting that children should go to school!

Why can't they just take the same maths and English assessment as everyone else? You don't have to be educated in school to take it.
Why would the government spend a fortune creating a special english and maths assessment for home educated kids when they are welcome to take the perfectly good assessment that already exists if they want to access further education in a formal setting?

AngryBookworm · Today 12:56

It's heartbreaking when children are taken out of school for the wrong reasons, usually parental beliefs - and these are usually the very children who benefit most from being exposed to diverse kinds of people and beliefs, as they would be in school. In some cases that includes basic science.

How do you know the reasons behind why parents remove their children from school? You say that the reasons are "usually" parental beliefs, so you must have come across a lot of cases of parents removing their children from school. Do you work for a school, or LA perhaps?

(When you de-register a child from school you do not have to give a reason.)

Totally agree, it’s something that really worries me. I’m a teacher myself and we don’t home educate, but I’ve joined a couple of Facebook support groups for home educators because my DS is autistic and we had some really low points with school over the last year including school refusal. I felt that we were on the verge of potentially needing to explore home education if it got much worse (thankfully it didn’t for us!) so joined the groups as part of my researching home education, as I wanted to know as much possible if we ever needed to run with it.

It’s utterly terrifying how little some families do, and some of the parents posting shouldn’t be in charge of educating a potato quite frankly! And the well meaning advice given in the groups by nice, well meaning folk to ‘keep everything in writing and refuse all meetings with local authority staff’ is quite frankly dangerous for some kids IMO. I know some families who home educate locally and they do an exceptional job. But unfortunately there are a lot of parents who are pulling kids out of school because it makes their lives easier and who have no intention of properly educating their kids to a decent standard and giving them lots of opportunities - and largely avoid as much LA involvement as possible. I think in ten years or so it’ll be seen as a huge scandal and rules will be massively tightened up as some kids will just fall through the cracks.

I’m not against home education at all, but some kids are 100% being failed due to this by some parents!