To disagree with home ed

Huh? I'm really sorry that is your experience but that certainly isn't ours. Kids are allowed to go to the toilet, but no not every class not every day. Kids do tend to take advantage.....School uniforms prepare kids for working life - being ready, wearing whatever work 'uniform' that entails, dressing appropriately, having the right tools etc. Kids aren't taking knifes into every school and the only case of it I know of the kid got excluded.

Is this not a chicken or egg situation?

children with SEN unsupported at school would be behind. Children who never went to school due to SEN may be behind if they were at school.

its hard for me as my kids are home Ed due to a failing school system. My dd was behind at school. My son wasn’t even given a school place due to extreme SEN. So I hate seeing it written off as a bad choice out of hand. However I know of parents who home Ed and leave all English to a tutor one hour a week- I do judge them!

my dd has a tutor 2 hours a week and I top up her learning myself. Her tutor told us our family has changed her mind in home Ed because like you her experience is home Ed kids are always behind and not doing work at home but my dd is now doing great and likely will pass her 11+ and I can get her back into school. It’s sad that that’s the exception though

Skinkytoilet

ah sorry to hear that, yes the people I know used to home Ed themselves with their child and then bring them to different sports/ hobbies to try to see could they mix/ make friends etc

Yes me too.

My son, and many others, were bullied at home ed groups. The sort of “socialisation” groups that people run for home ed kids in halls, groups of home educated families who get together.

Often billed as some utopia, but it’s mainly wet parents congratulating themselves on not sending thier kids to school, while the children roam around bored shitlesss and being dicks to each other (at least, that was my experience of 6 years of the bloody things).

I suppose it gives more opportunity to use their kids as social media fodder.

Skinkytoilet

I might have misread the op- I’m talking about a child at home being taught by parents, taken to group activities by parents but not being educated with other children?

Setting them up to fail and in my experience it meant lessons where there was no streaming were fraught with behaviour problems and slow going for the 40% who were at the expected level.

That is a very worrying statistic, children shouldn't be moved onto secondary school if they are not able to read well enough to understand all the text they'll have to read in secondary school. Its just setting them up to fail.

How privileged you all are to shit on parents who home educate their children 🙄

How about you just mind your business and concentrate on your 'perfect' children and your 'perfect' parenting!

The whole education system needs an overhaul, it's archaic and not relevant to today's world, stop concentrating on uniform and whether they have a pencil and sort out bullying and some teachers horrible attitude towards children who aren't perfect for them, then maybe less children would be home educated

Because kids will be arseholes to each other anywhere.

Home ed groups are no different. Get a group of children together for long periods, and bullying will happen. I found that most of the groups were boring as hell.

Where I was, it was mainly hippy parents who were ineffectual at discipline and their children ran riot, sorry, I meant “ran free” and could do as they pleased.

Bullying was rife.

I expect that the vast majority of homeschooled kids exist in your caveats. Who would undertake this for sport if their child was managing well at school and the whole endeavour could be outsourced?

I would add though that a friend I met as an adult was 'home schooled' as a child. Very little home schooling actually happened and she was being abused in the home. Of course there is no guarantee the abuse would have been noticed or stopped if she had been in school, but she might have had more chance if she hadn't been so isolated.

Skinkytoilet

I’m just actually asking so no disrespect but how doesn’t it? I went to guides, horse riding, swimming, the library and had friends in my area but school was where I was bullied. Both primary and secondary. The kids I know who were homeschooled are both in college now doing fine, in school they were tormented for being different

Absolutely agree with this.

My dc schools have loads of outdoor space that they get to use, plus forest school provision and obviously lots of outdoor PE. Plus the fact that we do loads of dog walks, bike rides, wild swims and tree climbing as a family. We go to museums, libraries, galleries and theatres at weekends and holidays. Talking about these activities as if they are somehow a USP of HE is just odd.

The parents I know who have done Home Ed have done it as a last resort for SEN kids who weren't coping. Their other children have stayed in mainstream school.

Home ed doesn’t take away bullying.

there were huge issues with bullying at various groups I went to over the years and that was the only bullying my son ever experienced.

I agree. How will they cope with college,Uni or the work place? 😞

I think it can work well when parents get together in home school cooperative communities, hire tutors etc - as long as the kids can socialize and they make progress and they have access to third spaces eg church to have that sense of belonging or community - I think when it’s done like this it can potentially be even better than school, but one parent trying to do it all at home with no friends or support is a disaster.
I’ve seen Facebook groups advising parents to keep the local authority away from them which is silly, as the local authority home visits can give lots of support and guidance

Worryingly, the people I see wanting to home educate are mainly doing so to avoid school fines from taking their kids on holiday! We have taken ours out before but we stayed under the threshold for a fine. So many people just taking their kids absolute piss and then acting the victim when they’re taken to court.

Lockdown showed me I am not at all compatible with home educating, plus I work full time so it just wouldn’t be possible. I do wonder how it can be done properly for the children to achieve their GCSE’s etc.

You didn’t list bullying in your reasons, I know two children home Ed because they were bullied in school badly, one bullied in two schools. Some schools are awful for quiet introverts, at the end of school I see a number of quiet children rushing out head down.

I used to do this and for about a month one year had a bully stand at the bus stop as I ran by asking me to talk in my funny voice. Had my parents been able to home educate I’m not sure Id have missed out given I loved school work but walked around on my own at lunchtime, got picked last for everything and had nobody to sit beside on the school tour bus unless someone was forced over to me in which case I was mostly ignored as they spoke over my head to their friends or we’d sit in silence. I was lucky later in school to find my people so there’s a pros cons thing here as I endured A LOT before that (special mention for the girl who stood up in our English class and asked could I not speak in debate as I took too long to get some words out).

I think it’s easy to roll your eyes at different home set ups until you’re faced with eg school refusal, constant illnesses, bullying, a child who is obviously different and hasn’t yet been able to integrate into social environments. Of course some schools do these kids the world of good but overfilled schools with all their behavioural problems now- not so much!

My 2 are Home Educated and I am perfectly capable of teaching them Shakespeare (degrees in literature and languages) and algebra (a level). My uncle has a phd in biology my cousin in IT (not going to be more specific due to nature of his job) and my Dad in Chemistry, that’s a lot of bases covered to begin with. One Mum of my just turned 11 year old’s friends however texted me outraged in October that her son was being expected to read a Shakespeare play in his first year at mainstream big school, didn’t I think it was inappropriate a) Romeo and Juliet for the subject matter and b) how would an 12 year old ever understand the language? She was bemused when I said that Dd2 had been ok with it when we did it last year but much preferred Macbeth. We had previously started with a Midsummer Nights Dream in “children’s edition” and she hated it and wanted it in proper Shakespearean language as it sounded “off”. She also enjoys Chaucer for the language. She also does his homework with him on a regular basis and texts me for help because neither of them understand the questions and when he asks for help in class just gets told to be quiet, it’s been explained.
Don’t assume we all live for social media likes or have tinfoil hats, most of us give up our entire lives to make the lives of our children better for whatever reason which is literally nobody else’s business. We have to satisfy the LA that our education is satisfactory and there’s a lot of work goes into recording that so we can demonstrate the appropriate progress, it’s not like we skip off into the sunset and put the kids in a cupboard under the stairs waiting for a letter from Hogwarts.
As for a safeguarding issue, there is no reason to suggest that Home Education is a safeguarding issue, many children are at risk within a school setting and many more are being abused at home and it’s not recognised when they are at school. May I point out that the widely named case of poor Sara Sharif was abused at home while attending school and known to social services since birth, the poor girl has since been erroneously used posthumously as a poster campaign by Starmer’s minions to vilify Home Education while he brings in digital id by the back door, makes disgraceful changes for the worse for SEN children including within schools and brings unprecedented control over internet access which will have an impact on SEN, LQBTQ+ and other aspects of life for adolescents in and out of school and make the lives of those of us who do teach at home harder again.
I’m not saying every Home Ed family is perfect but there’s a huge network of us and the vast majority are people who are working extremely hard to ensure their children learn to the best of their abilities, whatever their circumstances and it’s this perception that people allow their children to do nothing is very insulting and very disrespectful. Most parents want the best for their children and if that’s giving them a tailored education then why assume they would sit around not doing anything and choosing to allow their children not to thrive, that literally makes no sense? Just because something is different doesn’t make it wrong.

So the secondary school my daughter would have gone to, their Ofsted report remarked that 60% of pupils enter the school with reading ability below expected levels. 60% of pupils enter the school 'behind'. This tallies with my experience of comprehensive school.

I would say behind would mean not reaching minimum standards for the year, so if they're able to get a pass they're not behind. Bit harder to define in the uk school system where there's such a large range within a year group than in a system with yearly levels to pass to proceed.

It really depends on the definition of behind doesn't it. By year 11 there is such a variety range of abilities. Are the school kids who will scrape a 3 behind a child who will achieve a 7+?

Is one of my kids school friends 'behind' even though he's about to sit maths GCSE for the 5th and last time with a good place at university to study something more inline with his strengths?

Absolutely grim. So sorry.