To ask what is your instinctive response to hearing a child is Home Educated?

[NickiFury]

I am really interested to hear general opinions from everyone and hoping for some from professionals such as teachers etc. I really want to know what people think because in the main in RL, the response is overwhelmingly negative. I've had people threaten to call SS on me because ds isn't in school, been told it's "weird" and seen this face a lot.

Now to me home education is a totally normal thing but I suspect this is only because we are immersed in this world and know lots of other HE families (you'd be surprised how many are out there).

What has made me think about this was a friend telling me today that people in our community know of me and ds without ever having met us because we are notorious as that woman who doesn't send her kid to school .

Btw I also have a child who does go to school and is doing well but no one seems to gossip about that.

So what would YOU think if you someone told you their child is home educated?

Thanks .

My immediate reaction is that they are a bit odd and that the children will not be able to socialise with other children.

I'm not wearing judgeypants but talking from my experience of home-educated children.

I'm sure there are lots of lovely parents who educated their offspring at home, but that isn't my personal experience before I get flamed by the home ed lobby!

I certainly agree that there should be some sort of real and accessible support system but will admit many HE families wouldn't want that. I think so many have been failed by our education system that they just want no part of it.

I'm rather interested to see how the latest GCSE reforms will affect teenage HEd kids. Anything other than final exam (can't remember the precise term) can be incredibly difficult to arrange as a private candidate. Controlled assessments are even worse than sorting out coursework marking was.

I have a friend who has recently moved to my area in part because the college is happier to act as an exam centre for external candidates. It was that bad where he was before.

Certainly OFSTED wouldnt provide that. Perhaps a totally independent body with no agenda would be the way to go, made up of former HEers, qualified state teachers, fee paying school teachers etc But I realise that that would be very difficult if not actually impossible to set up.

TBH, and speaking as someone also HEing out of pragmatics, who would rather have workable school spaces than HE in many ways, I'd love some support from the LEA.

However, I would like it to be from someone who understood HE. This seems to be a problem-that LEA officers are often very experienced teachers but don't really understand how individual education works, and so aren't great at giving helpful advice. Also, they are mainly interested in spotting when education isn't happening, I think, rather than actively supporting families to improve.

I'd like very clear and easy access to the NC, because I seem to need to look for it in a different place each year (may be my aging memory!)

One thing I'd very specifically like is access to the school nurse system or some other system, because getting access to things like hearing tests or jabs via the GP seems really complicated.

(alternatively, I'd like the LEA not to close two frigging primary schools and a secondary school, all in the same year, within a fairly short distance of each other. And I'd like them to change the sibling rule whereby siblings only count for priority if they are younger, and kids who cannot be accomodated at any school don't get any level of priority. Yeah, I am pissed off.)

I don't really understand why just anyone can home educate their children.

I can't suddenly decide I'm going to be a doctor or a vet, so why is it ok to teach your own kids at home if you're not a qualified teacher.

To me it makes the assumption that anyone can be a teacher.

Well said Lesley

OFSTED is not suitable for assessing a family who HE. Too stressful for parents and children! No way!

"They may HE for spurious or downright abusive reasons"

I just wanted to mention that stats support that home educated children are less likely to be abused than school children (I thought it was too good to be true that abuse hadn't been mentioned yet, though perhaps I missed it)

I am a teacher (not in schools, to adults, but I am qualified) and I think that anyone can be a teacher. Obviously that's an extremely vague/broad viewpoint but I think everyone has knowledge to share and life is not as concrete as a national curriculum. Who decided that those exact pieces of knowledge, those skills, are more important than others?

I wouldn't claim that I could train someone to be a brain surgeon or a rocket scientist but if I was HE and my child wanted to be those things then I would help them find the route to that particular path, just as I would if they were in school. It's not like they learn those kinds of specialist things in high school anyway!

Someone was making the point earlier that if a child doesn't grasp GCSE maths, they are "screwed". Well, no they are not. If they don't need it, then they're not screwed. If they do need it, then they'll find a way to achieve it - hopefully of course with parental support. It's not a case of "I want to be a programmer but I can't be arsed to learn maths", it's "I need maths in order to go into programming. Let's see what I need from it and how I can achieve that".

If you moved to Italy tomorrow knowing only the word "Ciao", you'd not consider yourself "screwed" because you never learned Italian at school. You'd just either get by with a combination of English and sign language and slowly pick it up by immersion, or you'd buy a book or you'd find yourself a language school and book in for some lessons.

Learning doesn't magically stop when you're 18 and if you don't achieve something by a certain date, then, poof, the opportunity disappears in a puff of smoke. Loads of people study access courses or GCSEs or A levels or start degrees at an older age. I think that's great. I would really support a move towards an education system which isn't geared up to pushing everyone into uni - I went when older and got so much more out of it, if I'd gone at 18, it would probably have been wasted.

"To me it makes the assumption that anyone can be a teacher."

I think some people can teach and some can't. I think those that can't can learn to teach on teacher training courses and with experience. But I also think that some people are just good, natural teachers.

I think what's going on here, based on my non-extensive experience, is that if you can't teach to any degree, you don't really tend to HE. You'd be miserable as hell if you tried, I think. The skills needed to teach a single student are different to those required to teach a class. If I bored my kids rigid then they would let me know and I can't see how I'd want to continue.

I think that's one of those things where people say "But anyone could HE! I could HE! Imagine if I HE'd! I'd be rubbish at it! So there must be lots of people like me HEing and they must be rubbish at it!" .

But even leaving aside the fact that you might not actually be rubbish at it, people don't tend to like doing things they really are bad at (and getting feedback they are bad-and kids will say. You choose not to HE. Why? Because you think you'd suck. You do other things that you think you don't suck at. HErs use the same thought processes.

(Also, fwiw, something like 50% of HErs I know are teachers and an even higher percentage have done a significant amount of teaching. I think that's just because HE-types often like and are good at teaching)

I'm not anti-checks or whatever for HErs. I don't know how you'd do it, but I don't really much care if someone wants to come over and see how I'm doing. You have to know the community to see that this isn't a problem and its reasonable for outsiders to have some skepticism. And yes there are some examples of shocking practice. But I do think this might be less of a problem than people assume, in practice.

I'm not actually disagreeing, but it would be very difficult to assess home educated families. They're so very different. I'm wondering how some of the extreme examples, who don't do written work, would manage it.

You'd need compulsory registration first of course.

People always post such statistics in these threads. The problem is, it rather relies on good quality data collection, and the entire worry is that children are being home-educated to (successfully) avoid intervention.

That stat could either show that children are less abused, or less likely to have their abuse recognised.

Disclaimer: haven't read the whole thread. I'm a teacher. I don't like the idea of home schooling. I always think home schooled children are missing out on friendships and the normality of being a school pupil. Spending all day with mum or dad is not normal in our society- they need to learn to interact with 30 or so kids every hour, just as all of the other children are doing. I also think that parents who home school can be arrogant in thinking they are experienced enough to effectively teach 10 or so subjects to GCSE level when school teachers do a degree and a year's post grad to qualify to teach one. I now expect to be bombarded with hate, so will be hiding this thread!

Someone I know has just taken her 14 year old out of school to home educate her.My first reaction was 'What about her GCSEs?' They are still in the 'following her dreams' phase. I don't think I'd have the courage to do it.

" they need to learn to interact with 30 or so kids every hour, just as all of the other children are doing."

I'm genuinely interested. Why? Why is this a necessary skill?

My own kids were in school until a year ago and they learnt many useful things. for which I certainly thank their teachers. However I don't see that the HS'd kids I know don't have these skills.

I think interacting with very large groups in a classroom type situation is something very specific to the school experience. I don't think its needed in work, or at least not in any job I've done. Also, having seen HE'd kids in group learning situations, I think generally they are fine at doing this, which suggests its not something that needs a lot of learning anyway. I don't think the years of schooling my own kids have have given them any significant advantage in the interacting with large groups arena, even if I understood why it was a good thing.

I don't see a need for children to interact with thirty or so children every hour. Why would they NEED to do that? For some children this could be the least favourable learning environment I could imagine. I am a teacher too.

You will probably be bombarded with differing viewpoints rather than hate tbh.

Each to their own, but in my experience we have had HE children come into our school who have no idea how to socialise with other children.

Also they have found it hard to complete work within a time limit as, at home, they could take as long as they liked to complete something.

Fom a selfish kind of viewpoint, I looked forward to time on my own or returning to work once mine had gone to school!

My 14 year old, when 14, did some of her GCSEs and did quite well enough (if you think 'A' grades are adequate ). This is really not unusual or isolated example within the home education community. Most tend to do their exams early. Some nice LAs provide exam centres for us, and even charge less (not mine, alas).

Poster with a Game of Thrones name (sorry haven't scrolled back) - not sure why you posted a list of qualifications, or why relevant. Your teaching wasn't good enough to prevent your son's decline, and in only a few weeks.

First thought is poor kids with poor social skills as unfortunately that's my honest impression of any I've ever met.

It's not the first thought I'd like to have though

Perhaps I will start a thread berating parents who send their children to failing schools ...

Am I the only poster thinking that the HEs on mumsnet have had enough of a hammering now?

I think that the op misjudged this thread really, with asking for peoples' instinctive response.

also "the normality of being a school pupil". Again-why do they need this?

What I'd say to people who are talking about social life. How do you imagine the HE scene social life to be?

On every single day of the week, within a 30 minute drive of me, there is at least one HE group. These groups will be open to all and for a low fee. They will attract all ages. Probably about half of the groups run some kind of structured session. For older kids there are also specific GCSE classes which normally have paid-for tutors teaching a class of kids in the routine fashion. Generally this person is a teacher, IMO.

And of course HErs usually socialise with other families and usually send their kids to Scouts and stuff.

I live in a fairly rubbish area for HE in many ways. But even we have this level of provision. I think nowadays that's fairly standard as long as you are near some kind of big city.

And HErs do tend to want to go to the groups. Its normal for people to want to seek out those like them and HErs aren't any different.

What always makes me laugh is the stereotypes of HE kids. Long hair, woolly jumpers, geeky and awkward. My son has been like that all his life. He's 11 and has only been HE'd for about a year.

lol sorry the person teaching the HE GCSE class is generally a teacher in my experience not my opinion....