A wave of illiterate “home schooled” children

No, I’m targeting a social media wave for home ed because they want to “unschool” their kids and despite being wholly unqualified people are deciding they will not be sending their babies to school, with no knowledge of what that child’s personality, strengths or best environment will be.

My post literally says homeschooling is the right environment for some kids. I’ve just seen absolutely no evidence as to why it would be the right environment for these kids other than it’s “so they can spend more time in nature”, a great foundation for a literate future generation.

I dare say that children had to have been identified as having some sort of vulnerability to be eligible and so that allowed them to extend the offer to home educating families regardless of whether they were vulnerable or not. It was probably done in good faith, but they got their communication completely wrong.

That was the second problem with the correspondence. They could have sent a cheery email saying "Good news! We have secured some spaces on our wonderful holiday clubs, please let us know if interested"
I might have got in touch with my daughter's friends to see who fancied doing something with her. Instead they irritated me with the vulnerable label and the implication that we could only join in once they had checked we were the right sort of home educator.

Organisations rarely think about how they look from the outside and I think that's one of the problems with many LAs when they try to form positive relationships with home educating families.

Do you know why home educated children were put in the "vulnerable" category? It's really not appropriate that they were.

Ok, so by "monitoring" you just mean that they "find out" . Or do you really think that all schooled children are actually safe and happy?

I had an interesting email from my LA at the start of the summer. It was offering holiday activities to vulnerable children, of which any home educated children were automatically included.
To gain access to these activities, families had to be engaging with the local authorities in the way that they stipulated.
I would have thought that it would be the people who were not engaging in this way that they might hope would come, as they obviously would then be more visible.
Carrot, rather than stick would have been better, but it was that stick approach that they opted for. Puzzling.

That doesn't make sure all children are safe and happy.
Lots of children aren't having their needs met in school and the LA will do anything and everything the avoid funding necessary support.

Including pushing families to home education and off their hands

Everyone that works in the school and OFSTED monitors it.

Anyone who is properly home edding their child shouldn't object to being registered with the LA and having regular check-ins to make sure that everything is going as it should and the child is safe and happy.

The problem is that at the moment home educators don't have to be registered or have regular check-ins. Home educators who choose not to be registered and/or have check-ins are following the law. Lots of people on this thread are suspicious of people who are doing something perfectly legal. If we want everyone to be registered and inspected the law needs to change.

Also, who makes sure schooled children are "safe and happy" and that "everything is going as it should"?

Currently under Law families do have the right to decide to home Ed or send to school.
The rules around home Ed should already include safeguarding
If the processes are done properly by the LA then that is fine.

If the LA can't or won't do what is expected of them for children in school or children home educated the problem is the LA
Bringing in more regulations won't help the LA do their job if they can't manage a job that is less work now.

Bringing in sensible workable solutions is one thing but they have to be logical and workable and they need to protect the most vulnerable not target easy pickings and leave the vulnerable even more vulnerable

All.my experiences of the LA and everything I read about the new ACT doesn't fill me with confidence that this new ACT will.do anything to support vulnerable and at risk children or support SEN children to get an education

Yeah, of course evey one will be different. It just used to make me laugh when the parents at the local home ed groups would talk about him like he was the bogey man to be avoided (rural county, it was mainly just him). It was nothing like the nice middle aged man who would sit and chat to ds about Star Wars!

He was a godsend when our shitty neighbours kept calling social services to say were neglecting ds (they didn’t agree with home ed). I called him and he immediately called SS and sorted it all out as he knew us and had seen ds. It made what could have been a very stressful situation a lot easier.

Not a parent alert.....

My concern about home educating is those families who use it as a reason to duck under the radar. That little girl who was murdered by her father and stepmother (Sara, but I can't remember her surname but it was in the last couple of years) was pulled from school to "home educate" around the same time the school raised a safeguarding alert, which then appeared not to be acted on. She appeared to thrive at school, probably because she felt safe there.

ETA, I see others have mentioned Sara. Note to self.....read the full thread!

Yes Sara was failed by social services, nobody is denying that. I followed the trial closely and it was clear that there were multiple failings from before she was even born and throughout her life.

Great that you only know kids who are out and about. I know several who don’t go to groups, either due to SEN or MH making it difficult, being of an age where they feel like groups are too young for them or because they can’t afford the things that interest them, most have a cost especially once they are teenagers who don’t want to meet and play at a local park. There are also many many examples of children not attending groups in the large national facebook groups, just because the ones you know are visible doesn’t make that universal.
I’m not saying that all of these children are at risk but I am responding to your statement that home ed children are visible because they go to groups and appointments when in fact many don’t and we shouldn’t deny that thsi is the case.

I would love to see more positive relationships built between home educators and the LA, it would have to work both ways, LAs have been known to massively overstep and lie to parents which is why there is so much mistrust in the first place. In some areas this has been achieved, I would like to see it happen more widely.

I think you were lucky with the person you had through. There are going to be people like you had that are great but equally there are some who are awful. Because you don't know if you will get a good one or a bad one allowing them in your home and to see things above what they legally have a right to is risky because if you allow it and they make life difficult it will cause a lot of issues

There was an inquest into Sara's death, I'm not sure what will happen next but everyone who played a part will have been scrutinised and hopefully mistakes will be learned from.

Most home ed children are probably receiving a good education and being seen regularly by other people, but we do not know how many are not being seen because we don't see them.

It's not your "right" to home ed, it's your responsibility to ensure your child gets an education. You get to choose how to provide that, and if it's in a school, they are inspected regularly to make sure they are fulfilling their duties, including safeguarding. If a child goes to school with a suspicious bruise and the school doesn't report it, they are breaking the law.

If you provide it at home then that needs to be open to the same scrutiny and the child has the same right to be protected. If you are giving them the education the deserve and they are being well looked after then there should be no objection to the LA satisfying themselves that that is the case and moving on.

I didn’t have that experience at all when I was home educating.

A really nice guy from the LA popped round once a year. He ticked some boxes, ds did show him work because he wanted to. The LA man took a real interest in it. For a couple of years, a lot of what ds wrote for English and the art and films he made were based around his love of Star Wars. The home ed man was a massive Star Wars geek too, so they would spend ages talking about that.

Then we’d have chat about dogs (we had the same breed), and off he fucked for a year. He wasn’t intrusive or judgemental at all.

I was shunned by a lot of the other home educators I knew for doing that though. I soon learned to keep my mouth shut about allowing that awful “intrusion” into my private life as they saw it.

Not everyone has bad experiences. And to be honest, the ones I knew who did were extremely angry and defensive and got people’s backs up anyway.

That's not how we are treated by the LA. That would be fine but that is not what will happen

In reality it will be people with no concept of home Ed weighing in with there views and expectations..no concept of SEN, no concept of why school has being damaging.

Why are you not focusing on saving at risk children like Sara? Why are social services not being held to account for their failings?

Are you campaigning for better schools to meet the needs of children with SEN who have been forced to home Ed by the LA?
Or are you just targeting home ed

That’s fine. Some make that perfectly valid choice. I just wanted to point it out mainly in case anyone else was going through the same now whose absences were not being recorded correctly.

If you go on your local government ombudsman you’ll find case after case of the LA poorly administrating SEN place applications - they really are very inefficient

You said LA are not efficient in previous post. Your whole thread is about more monitoring of how Ed

But they can't even do the monitoring they are meant to do now efficiently

I'm sure you are right. But there no way we could have faced dealing with the stress of a legal challenge alongside everything else.

But why do you see it as targeting? I've seen it in the facebook groups that people are extremely aggressive and against LA contact. Someone popping by every so often to say hello and ask your child if everything is OK, or even doing so on Teams, shouldn't be seen as some sort of massive attack on your family. Neither should the LA keeping a record of children who are being home educated. If your child was in school a teacher would be doing this daily.

But at least those parents were given the opportunity to learn better grammar etc, an opportunity they are taking away from their children.

There are two people I can think of that I went to school with and were middle set/average across the board and left with mostly B and C at GCSE. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but they are now adamant they will be homeschooling their now toddlers.

They have no idea how academic their kids will be, but one is already talking about how she is teaching her 3 year old daughter about beauty treatments so she will be “the best beauty technician ever as she’s learned about it her whole life”. What if that kid wants to be a doctor - there is absolutely no chance that will happen if she’s home schooled by her nail technician mum on beauty treatments her whole life, with no academic rigour around sciences or broader topics.

The other incorrectly cited a scientific paper the other day to support her conspiracy belief. When challenged on it, her supporting evidence was an instagram post.

I would really like the next generation to have better critical thinking skills than that, so yes it is my business. The education of children is everyone’s business, especially where the parents are making bad decisions.

Getting to 16 and being able to cook and clean is great, but it won’t get most people further than being a good house wife or house husband.

I’m not saying homeschooling isn’t the right answer for some children, I’m sure it is, but I’m confident that the social media trend toward homeschooling is will be on the whole detrimental.