to wonder why teachers are so sure school is better than home Ed for all children?

[IceBeing]

An acquaintance is thinking of removing her 5 yo from school as he has started self-harming due to anxiety about going.

The school seem to be all over themselves to tell the parent that there is no way home ed would be preferable to carrying on in school.

What makes schools so very certain on this point and what would it take for a school to admit a child might be better off being taught at home for a spell or even entirely?

Yep Jello I agree. I disagree about the financial similarity of he parents. After all, you have to be able to afford for one parent to not work, to buy resources and books etc that are all free in schools. The financial of home education must be enormous. Not everyone could afford it and thus the range of backgrounds of children will be limited.

Gudrun I think your post perfectly sums up my concerns.

Not all he parents have one sahp, lots work shifts or both work part time and make a lot of sacrifices to home ed. lots of home ed parents use childcare too.

As for resources you could spend thousands if you wanted to! We borrow lots of books from the library and have lots of free resources at our home ed group. My kids also get lots of books for Christmas and birthdays. Lots of online resources do home ed discounts. Buying in a curriculum can be quite expensive I think (but I've never done it so I don't know!) but again for less well off families that's just about priorities. There are definitely home educating parents that are far from well off.

I have to buy books for my (state school) secondary aged child!!

I have a severely disabled child so already can't work outside the home (run my business from home). I know home edded kids who have 2 working parents (my school educated children are friends with them :shock horror: )

Indeed Devillish. I buy books for my primary age daughter too but I certainly don't buy every book she uses which is what you're undertaking if you home school.
Two working parents? I'm curious to understand how that works. If you're working from home you're surely not giving full commitment to teaching a child and if you're working late shifts then you're probably pretty exhausted by the time the teaching day begins. I'd personally hate it if my child's teachers worked a night shift somewhere before commencing their day with my child.

I'd hate it if my kids teacher had 30 other 5 yo kids demanding their attention all the time....

not even really kidding....

I was watching a swimming lesson the other day...2 staff and 7 kids. There was one kid who no one spoke to directly for the entire lesson. I genuinely can't imagine what its like with 30+.

I watched a little of 'Time for school' on Cbeebies (DD wanted to) and they were playing dressing up as princesses so the brave knights could rescue them. I guess that particular school hadn't heard about the damage gender stereotyping does down the line.

I have to buy every book for my secondary (state) child. I'm hoping it will change now he's starting GCSE courses, but he wasn't given a single text book during KS3. I bought him some because otherwise he had nothing to refer to.

I must MUST bear in mind that just because I made zero use of textbooks at any point in my education it doesn't mean they won't be a useful resource for DD.

Her dad will probably make sure that happens though...he is way more textbook oriented than me.

The "2 working parents" comment from HEers does rather assume that you aren't talking about 2 full time working parents doing Monday - Friday out of the house at 8, back at 6pm or later. It involves 2 part time/one part time one full time on different days or long shift combinations so that one parent is at home at all times - it limits the career options of parents (and you can't say, have one do a night shift if they are then expected to HE the DCs the next day).

Alternatively, I've met someone who HE's her DCs, but works full time and has a nanny, who used to be a primary school teacher. Basically, she's hired a governess. Not a bad idea if you can afford it... (costs about the same as she used to pay when her DCs were pre-school)

I've met a few adults who had been HE, they were very clever people who couldn't understand office politics - but most interestingly, those who were HEed the whole way through secondary school as well were great at subjects their parents were good at. They had similar interests to their parents. That being an issue or not really is part of how you view education and schooling. One of the things secondary schools do well, is expose DCs to subjects/sports/people/ideas they wouldn't be exposed to at home.

For the last couple of weeks, up to and including monday, teachers will be walking in to classrooms of up to 36 yr 7 children, with minimal information (possibly a SEND list), some IEPs, PEP, etc. won't be ready till January.

I can see and understand why some parents choose to HE their children.

IceBeing - they are useful for tests/exams - if you go down that route at any stage. I didn't buy them for primary.

Many schools with this service just think they are well placed without being.

What does this mean?

dino there may be something in what you say about transferance of interests...but you would have to do some proper statistics...I and my brother and sister did the same as my Mum and Dad and were school educated...I think there is a large predisposition for following parents interests anyway - it may not be worse for home ed children!

medium.com/synapse/homeschool-this-7e6c77eeaad

There's a nice bit in this blog post about how children learn things (to a very high level) that their parents know nothing about.

Icebeing.

My dd has followed interests, well the profession that dh has because she was interested in pursuing this career, she knew this at aged 7/8.
I think she would have done this anyway as she worked hard and was doing this on top of school.
She decided school was getting in the way and asked if she could leave to pursue her dream, which was to gain a place at a ss specialist school.
£ years later she has done this and starts her new school on Monday.
No way would she have done this whilst still attending school.
So yes, transference does exist in H.ed families as well as schooled families.
If it works for you and under the best circumstances for the child the benefits far outweigh those of school. The opportunities and freedom can be immense.
Finally, if dd wasn't to attend this school she would be H.ed right through to A level.

No way would she have done this whilst still attending school.
How many of the other children at this school were HEd?

I've decided to home educate my just-turned-four DD for as long as it seems like the best decision for her. Like going to school, I'm fully expecting there to be advantages and drawbacks. Having known many primary school teachers and volunteered/coached in a range of primary schools, I'm confident that they don't do anything magical at school in terms of education or emotional support.

Socially, I'm not convinced that school is the right place for every personality type to mature. There is a school of thought that our culture's over-emphasis on the extrovert can cause introverts to feel shamed and dislocated. Certainly, both my DH and I felt more lonely at school than we ever did as adults. That said, I've made every attempt to get my DD ready for school; we've attended every group and done everything possible to give her a chance to join in with the crowd if she wants to. She spectacularly doesn't. The thing we won't do is force her to assume a social persona at the age of four, simply because the alternative is spending years of her life as the odd one out. I have seen her spending more time like that over the last two years than I ever plan to again. As adults, people are allowed to be different and find their niche in a way children aren't. As adults, people are required to talk to each other in acceptable ways; not true for children. We have no qualms about creating an artificial environment for our DD because school is also artificial. That said, it's an unfortunate truth that life is easier if you go with the flow, so we will continue to do extra-curricular activities/home education social groups with DD in the hope that she will be ready for the school bandwagon at a later stage. When talking these issues through with school professionals, we were interested to find that our very real fears about DD becoming depressed in a school environment (on the back of her experience in nursery environments) were brushed off as 'well, school is inevitable and they all settle down eventually'. As the child of a parent who made her living home schooling school refusers for the board, I know this is simply not true.

I wouldn't expect teachers in mainstream schools to have a realistic idea of what good home education is like, whereas they ought to have a realistic idea of what good school-based education consists of. So they're very unlikely to be well-placed to have an opinion.

bruffin

The head said they have several most years the school attracts the less conventional, fewer than 300 attend.

I don't think her state primary would have taken to kindly to her calling and saying she couldn't come in on Friday or she needed the next two weeks off, or she needed a half day on tuesday because she was travelling for work.

Having said all that, I have had the opportunity to listen to a wide range of parents who have a disability and home educate. I would be the first to champion such a thing. However. Some of those children are living horribly curtailed lives that seem to begin and end with minecraft. This is also bound to be true of non-disabled parents who home educate. I don't know how there can be greater accountability around home education because it's right and proper that parents should be the best judge of what's in their child's best interests. Education boards are notoriously poorly informed about home education and biased to begin with; there is absolutely no way they should be able to enter homes and make a decision about what's best for the child. Apart from anything, they would often be wrong. I know a family who had home educated two children of 8 and 9, neither of whom could really read because they hadn't chosen to learn it yet (were well ahead in some other areas). When they decided they wanted to learn, they did so in a week and quickly began to eat books in a way that would delight the heart of a mainstream school teacher. But a visiting 'professional' would have been horrified at that approach.

feather tbh the social aspect is a significant part of our decision also. Thanks for your well thought out and expressed comments.

twinki I am unhappy but not too surprised to hear that kids have problems adapting at 7.

DD couldn't adapt at 2 when we tried to put her in nursery...she got horribly upset every time a new arbitrary rule emerged. She still bangs on about the time the boy next to her got told he HAD to eat his lunch or he couldn't leave the table....or the time they told her not to cry.

So I don't imagine it will be much easier at 7 when she might have a better grasp of the rational behind some of the arbitrary rules...but not the ones that actually don't make sense...meanwhile everyone else has been ingrained in the ethos of sit down, shut up and do as you are told for an extra 2-3 years.

IceBerg - it's more that with HEed DCs, while they might have picked up their parents' passions even if they had been school educated, they aren't exposed to other people's passions - while many parents might well be able to teach a range of subjects up to GCSE level, it's very hard to instill a passion in a subject or area you don't have a passion about, whereas in secondary schools, you'll be exposed to a range of teachers many with passion for their subject area.

I know several people who studied subjects at uni their parents didn't understand or didn't understand why their DCs wanted to pick that. I know people who are very good at sports that their parents don't particularly like, having had their talent discovered/encouraged at school. (Although interesting how many of the team GB were privately educated a the last Olympics, one of the explainations put about at the time was that private schools taught a range of sports that state schools don't, so for state school eduated people to have got v good at certain sports, their parents had to be interested enough to take their DCs to classes/groups/competitions on evenings/weekends, while private schools did it for all pupils regardless of parental interest).

Parents are a great influence on most children, but HE children only have their parents to influence and instill interests in them. Again, might not be something that bothers many HEing parents, but it's worth considering.

Do you know Ice, a fellow home educator was commenting this week that every neighbourhood child beats a path to her front door after school because they know that the engaged, fun part of learning (with adult attention) is ongoing at their house!

feather the reading thing you describe is also very important. learning earlier doesn't equal learning better and in fact the opposite is very likely true particularly when it comes to reading and maths. Learning it when you are ready and interested is totally the way forward and apparently totally impossible to achieve in classes of 30.

Dinosaurs Most home educators I know pool their resources so the children actually have a number of interested adults with a range of talents who they have grown up knowing (in some cases these adults are primary school teachers). If there's no network of support, it must be harder. I think home education is a different kettle of fish if there is absolutely no money in the kitty for private one-to-one/group tuition in areas that the parents don't know about.