A wave of illiterate “home schooled” children

I'm a school teacher with a SEN child (who attends school) and I think it's perfectly reasonable to home educate to avoid being harassed by attendance people while you do the avalanche of paperwork required to get even a tiny bit of state help!

Especially if your child is miserable. No-one has kids to attempt to force them daily to attend an institution that's not meeting their needs.

I don't think these parents are lifestyle blogging about it though tbh. Maybe blogging trying to help other SEN parents.

I agree it’s the socialisation that kids get at school that’s so important to their well-being. Kids are meant to be with other kids. In adult life, you have to be able to mix with people very different from you, so important kids are encouraged to do the same.

Having said that, school has become pretty intense from a young age. When I was at infant school (until 7) it was mainly leaning through play and having fun. Secondaries have become exam factories, rather than giving kids a full, rounded education and encouraging them to develop a lifelong love of learning. And some uniform rules are ridiculous. Making teenagers wear ties when most jobs don’t require it is so silly.

Perhaps some of them were like my friend who did what she could at home with her anxious and recalcitrant but bright autistic son, who struggled to attend school from Y7 in 2020, but never received any support or offer of alternative provision in spite of always engaging with the LA and school. He decided himself to go back to school in Y11, passed some GCSEs and is now studying BTECs at sixth form.

I was thinking the same the other day with some of the things (in the UK) I have seen on Facebook. One in particular was a woman who had decided to pull her daughter out of school (I can't remember the specific reasons, but it wasn't SEN related). My 8 year old has far better spelling and grammar than this woman who was planning on homeschooling a 14 year old.

One of the reasons why fines over attendance don't make sense to me. It's children who suffer for it.

I do actually completely agree with you.
I also found the school provisions in my area really poor. There's an assumption from Government and those who live in wonderful areas that all schooling across the country is the same standard, or similar, to where they live which is frankly not the case.

Bridgit Philipson would do well to actually do a parental survey for each county/LA on real worries and experiences of parents. Even simple differences, such as having all girls state schools that aren't selective (some counties have and some don't) might get huge swathes of school refusers back, for example. Sexual violence and the rise in AI has really pushed the need for these safe single sex spaces.

Agree. Ultimately I would be surprised if less than half of them claimed benefits.

But there seems to be a movement to homeschooling by people who are simply anti establishment with a point to prove. Their grammar and communication on social media tells me they’re not equipped to homeschool a child. Not least I think the socialisation and soft skills school provides are hugely important too.

This is the thing that scares the bejesus out of me. I honestly think its a timebomb which we will come to bitterly regret not dealing with earlier.

There certainly are many parents doing this for the right reasons, doing it because they are being failed by mainstream education and who are creating a rigorous and well thought out curriculum at home. I know one family who is doing this exceptionally well because the neurodiverse children were struggling at mainstream school.

But there is a sizeable cohort of people doing it because they lack the drive or the organisation to support their children through school, because they basically can’t be arsed or because they are in the grip of anti-establishment ideology and believe that children “know better” how to teach themselves. I have seen so much of this on local social media groups and its terrifying. In the latter two scenarios the parents are woefully equipped to deal with education and we are shoring up huge problems for a generation of kids being “educated” in this way.

The absolute scandal of it is the lack of oversight and regulation and the inability of the authorities to tell the difference. Its the sign of a very decadent society that the penny has not dropped yet about how dangerous this is.

I don't feel that concerned as it's never going to be loads of people, but I am a bit horrified by some 'unschooling' parents who seem to think that teaching kids to read is a form of oppression. That's not going to end well.

Well they won't just be working with people born in the same academic year. I used to go to a group there were toddlers to teens. One mum was a professional artist and you'd see all these kids working together. We also all chipped in and had a French tutor who ran groups. It might be eating French food or learning French songs for the little ones and age appropriate stuff for older ones.

One family had a dad who was head at a local grammar, other parents were unemployed.

Honestly age and socioeconomic groups were much broader than your average school.

But your children will be paying more tax to fund their benefits and there will be shortages in critical roles.

The whole 'school gates' stuff is weird. I've spoken to about two parents 'at the school gates' in 6 years and only because they're parents of my daughter's friends. I keep my distance from all of them. So they then think I'm the odd one? Should I care?

We never do now, there’s a safety net for everything

I’ll get flamed but… some increasingly pull their child out of school and demand “homeschooling” - as this way they get away from the attendance issues and potential fines from school officials and also they can concentrate on ASD/ADHD ECHP paperwork and then claim DLA and convert to PIP at 16. Many know their child won’t want to work or ever get a job (particular a low paid or hard one) and just want to game in room all day/on tik tok/eating rubbish etc and they know it’s easier to get them out of school and they can make easier disability claims both now and later. £800 even 4 weeks and they can stay at home happy and not work.

Surely at that point you just say "you've made you bed, now lie in it".

My algorithm is showing me the same OP, and there’s a horrid little devil on my shoulder that can’t help but think ‘well, at least it cuts down on potential rival applicants for my children when it comes to uni/their chosen career’

I honestly have no doubt that home educating can be done correctly and successfully….just not by the current wave of parents.

the strangest thing to me is when they claim it’s in their child’s best interests, but share them on their open social media as if that’s not the thing that couldn’t be less in their best interests!

DD only passed one GCSE.

She has always struggled academically. Written exams don't let her show her ability. She has since passed Functional Skills qualifications.

But we had amazing discussions triggered by her sociology and English Lit GCSE studies. She is intelligent and interested in WHY the world is as it is, and can discuss it in depth. She discovered that she excelled at public speaking despite a stammer, thanks to school.

She is a talented dancer and has worked as an assistant teacher since she was 15. She is great with children, and is in great demand for child care around her College and dance commitments.

Passing GCSEs is not the only indicator of a 'good education'. For most young people it is a good baseline of achievement.

I haven't seen any more homeschooling parents with bad SPaG than mainstream schooled parents. Neither have I seen any more homeschooling kids with bad SPaG than their mainstream schooled peers. These things are everywhere and doesn't mean one is worse than the other, or whatever point this thread is trying to prove.

Perhaps you have too high of an expectation of homeschooled kids and their parents (that you don't have of others) to only notice something that is just as rife in mainstream schools.

To be fair, I was so glad to no longer have to talk to the cliquey school gate mums who treated it like secondary school all over again with the gossip and the bitching, so I couldn't care less if those mums saw me as odd for home educating 🤣

I'm going to reach a point fairly soon where the support I can give my daughter in maths is more on the cheerleading side than anything to do with maths. There is so, so much I could never teach her. I hate her school, I think much of the school system absolutely sucks, but it's what we've got and they can still do the education part better than me. There are definitely people who need to know their limits - but then that goes everything really. Although I do appreciate that a lot of parents (seems to be mostly mothers) are pushed into by the aforementioned sucky system.

I’m a secondary teacher and we often get homeschooled children reappearing in Y11 so they can take their GCSEs- possibly when parents realise how expensive it actually is to enter for the exams. I had a long conversation with the parent of a lovely student, telling me all the stuff they had been teaching her at home in my subject, which is all well and good but, as I had to delicately explain, none of it is actually on the GCSE syllabus.

@Iamthemoom the homeschools I worked with who were like the first group described by @winewolfhowls would never meet the latter group she describes.

The latter group would never seek to join the HE networks that are in place. To be frank they would terrify them if they did and that’s not hyperbole. They are not easy families to be around. These families and their motivations and outcomes are absolute opposites.