To think that most people actually do understand, and therefore support, home education...

[PennyRa]

And it's just a loud minority that are ignorant?

Wow. Some of the replies on this thread are absolutely awful. I wonder how many of the posters who vehemently ‘disagree’ with home education are aware of just how harmful the school system can be for children with additional needs?

My daughter used to go to school. In Year 4, she became very unwell and her illness left her with life changing problems. We battled on for almost two years, we tried everything to make it work until the SENCO suggested home education.

You might think, if your experiences of the school system have only been positive, that schools would work with you to help your child adapt and recover. The reality involved teachers routinely ignoring medical advice to make things easier in class, sending her home when staff were absent, excluding her from lessons and activities that the OT and nursing team said she could do.

In the end, they’d caused her more harm than good. Physically and mentally. Not because they’re bad people but because the way schools are structured has massive limitations. If you find yourself with a child who suddenly has profound medical problems but no learning difficulties, there isn’t a clear place for them.

Some countries have a greater number of schooling options. Belgium for example has eight categories of specialist schools. There are schools for the physically disabled, schools for the visually impaired, schools for those with learning/behavioural difficulties. There is a strong commitment to giving every child the right to an education which maximises their potential.

Our system is sink or swim. Often teachers feel they didn’t sign up for the responsibility of dealing with medical issues and there’s a valid debate to be had regarding this. However, while there is no current alternative and funding for 1:1 support is so patchy - that is what the job is.

I home educate my daughter now. It’s not the easy option, it’s challenging and all consuming. It’s the most important thing I’ll ever do because my daughter’s future rests on it.

I work hard, I’ve taken courses myself in the evenings to ensure I’m competent for her. We follow the curriculum so that, should she ever feel able to rejoin a regular school, we are on track. We also have a lot of fun. She is ahead with maths and English and our home education coordinator is very pleased with her progress, as are her many healthcare teams.

She is intelligent, she is engaging and so smart. I wish that things were easier for her but I’m determined not to let her down. This week she’s been unwell following her most recent procedure but we joined a parliamentary education session with a member of the House of Lords, we finished our latest book and we’ve done a virtual guided tour related to one of our current topics. All from her bedroom while she’s been recovering.

Please think twice before calling home educated children odd or weird. Often these are families who’ve been dealt a bad hand and they’re making the best of it. Maybe my daughter is unusual, she’s been through a lot and the system that works for many has let her down.

I think about normality a lot. I’ve had moments where it feels like we’re missing out but when I read threads like this? I’m not sure normal is all that great.

@LaNis but it's ok to call teachers idiots as other pro-HE posters have on this thread.
The comment about HE children being odd was cruel and uncalled for but I don't think there's been much other nastiness from the pro-school posters.

No, of course it's not. Absolutely not. I haven't seen those posts, but I saw this one - I have 183 unread messages to look at, but I think I'll take my leave here. These threads only ever go one way.

@Gagglestaggerhome - I didn’t call her child odd. I was saying that children who are seen as “spirited” actually have no boundaries and that is irritating to have to be around. I should have said for every child called “spirited” but I stand by the point.

No, of course not. Some of the concerning posts from home educators are not from autocorrect, but quite obvious errors such as loose/lose, which clearly indicate a lack of knowledge.
Even if home education is done adequately at primary level, it's a far more difficult operation at secondary age. How many parents are competent enough to teach the sciences and languages to A level? It would involve expensive tutoring, and I am not convinced that all home educating parents have the means to finance it.

That's interesting, the home educating families I know have one or both parents that are professionals, list of professions for those that are curious are:

TAs
Secondary school teachers
GPs
Pharmacists
Optometrists
Radiographer
Audiologists
Farmer
Primary school teachers

So for those that assume it is only parents who don't have 'real' careers/jobs, you are mistaken

@Flapjackquack not you no, it was @Clarabe1 on page one.

@Gagglestaggerhome - ah, LaNis’ issue is with me responding to the poster who thinks schools make little robots and HE children will be social trailblazers.

I think it's important for people to listen to the perspectives of adults who were home educated as children. Parents who choose to home educate believe that they're doing the right thing for their children, and when they post on MN, they're generally seeking validation and support for their choice. That's fair enough.

But if you speak to a sample of adults who have themselves been home educated (rather than the adults doing the home educating), I suspect you would get a far more mixed picture.

I usually avoid posting on home ed threads on MN, partly because, well, reading about home ed can be a bit triggering for me, and partly because it's not very productive to pop onto a thread of home educating parents and point out to them how dreadful home education was for me in various ways. For all I know, most of the children being home educated by MNers are having a far better time of it than I did.

But I responded to this thread because it's so goady of the OP to say that if you don't support home ed, it must be because you don't understand it.

Trust me, I'm not the only adult out there who has struggled to cope in the world after a childhood of being educated at home.

One of the problems about home education is that because there is no oversight, the spectrum of how different families go about doing it is extremely wide. The dark end of the spectrum (which involves social isolation and child abuse) is dark indeed.

If I can't unequivocally support home education, it's not because I don't understand, it's because I have firsthand experience of the dysfunctional end of the home education spectrum.

Have you been reading the same thread I have? With the exception of a few balanced posts, this thread has been negative judgement on home educators from beginning to end.

I was at a sports centre recently on an Inset day and saw a group of home educated children meeting up. It was interesting watching them. I’m sure the parents would say ‘see, they socialise with lots of people!’ but they are socialising with other home educated children, that’s not representative of a range of backgrounds in the same way school is.

So you didn't notice any of the negative judgement on teachers...from home educators then?

I see it differently to you. A few balanced posts from home educators, people bringing up valid concerns around HE and people evangelising HE and demonising schools. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

TA's and farmers are hardly professionals in the way GPs are!

And how does a working GP or teacher home educate as well? How do you have a real career AND home edcuate one or more children? That I am curious about. Please enlighten.

@lieselotte

School is very good at getting people used to petty officialdom with loads of rules (mainly aimed at crowd control). Home educated kids won't be used to them, and will probably be less good at blindly accepting authority. I am not sure that is odd or a bad thing. We need more people who question the status quo.

You see this attitude is in my view part of the problem.

Certain sections of the HE community create this sense that any kind of structure or institutional infrastructure is automatically bad.

You set up the idea that home educated kids are “less good at blindly accepting authority” as if this were an unadulterated positive. Actually this is subjective and there’s a lot of nuance to this.

Yes we need people who are capable of critical thinking and who have the ability to challenge authority. But positioning authority as automatically suspicious is not ideal. It creates a conspiratorial mindset and has the potential to be a bit delusional.

The reality is that most people will at some point in their lives have to work in an institutional framework of some kind. Not everyone will be able to exist outside the “system” or without rules or structure.

There’s a thin line between teaching children to question authority and teaching them that they are “special” and don’t have to consider the rules or the impact of what they do on those institutions or the societies they support. While I am very much in favour of encouraging children to think critically, some of the attitudes that I have seen instilled in HE (and on this thread) seem to accentuate “difference” in an unhelpful way.

What I haven't seen from any of the anti home ed posters is recognition that most people they'll have met in their lives who are odd, ill educated, rude etc will have been to school, and yet none of their problems will be blamed on that. Whereas if you came across someone like that who you later found our had been home educated most people would immediately say - aha, that's why! Like the PP whose daughter knew a HE child at uni who was socially awkward and barely came out of her room. I was at uni with plenty of people like that and every last one of them went to school but you don't see me saying school was therefore obviously the reason why.

Statistically, most strange people, most entitled people, most rude people, most people who think the world revolves around them, most people who have a lack of resilience, most people who can't spell, most people who have poor social skills - almost every one of them will have been to school. I wouldn't say school made them that way. But I'm willing to bet if they were HE then many posters here would attribute their personality defects to that and that alone.

Covid homeschooling confirmed my suspicion that I would rather boil my head than homeschool my children permanently. My DH and I are both well educated people, who have to work with a range of people in our professional lives, but we failed spectacularly in home schooling.

If others feel it's best for their child, then they should have the opportunity to make that decision, but it is absolutely not for us.

What this thread has really shown me is how many posters have veye strong views about home education and schooling without having much of a clue about the vast ways families might choose to home educate and a amusingly rose-tinted view of state education.

I'm a teacher and will be considering home education if I'm unhappy with the state offer for my DC.

The idea DC would get a worse deal from me, DH and our family than they would in a classroom of 32, with assorted qualified, unqualified, specialists and non specialists, with varying amounts of supply staff and a school pushed to breaking point dealing with a whole load of issues that aren't education based is hilarious.

Yes but what about proportionally. If you have 10 schooled children vs 10 home schooled children who will be the better socially adjusted as a proportion? There will always be more schooled children as a total in any category as there are lots more of them.

I admit I have only met two home ed families. One the parent was in the didn’t like being told what to do camp so withdrew her child from education, who then hung around by our garden fence waiting for us to get home from school and openly told us they did little else. They then moved area and I doubt her mother registered them in the new one. Was she a little strange, yes. Do I think HE is to blame? No. Do I think it helped? Hell no. Her mother was strange and was her only adult role model. The other was Plymouth Brethren and lived next door to my friend.

Yet, I was not completely closed off to the idea of it but the attitudes of SOME on this thread, the points raised by those against it and having a look at some is the studies because of this thread, has really put me off. I doubt I’d fit in to HE in my area either if the group in the park is anything to go by.

Homeschooling through covid was about as different from home education as you can get.
You were trying to replicate school at home, following work set by the school while effectively bring prisoners in your own home.
This is nothing at all like home education in norm circumstances.

I get that HE isn’t for everyone but comparing it to covid is like comparing HE to school! Many experienced joke educators completely failed during covid too, we were all just doing what we could to survive at the time.

I have read it thanks and I still think it's bollocks.

What does my son not get being home educated that he would get at school? Specifically from my posts, what is it he isn't getting?

Regarding socialisation, meeting up with kids at judo or whatever once a week is not the same as sharing a space and experience with the same people day in day out. It is hard to forge any kind of friendship that way.

For some children, HE is the best option, eg if they struggle with school for a genuine reason. Also if you live remotely (however we are not in Australia!) or the child is ill. HE-ing to hothouse, or because the parent (nearly always mum) fancies it, let alone for nefarious religious or anti-establishment reasons is selfish.

dn works in a museum. Every so often they have HE groups book. She says they ruin her week!

HE kids don't just meet up for judo once a week. Most of our kids see peers every day. Today my son went to the same meet up he does every Tuesday, with the same kids. Yesterday he did his drama group, again with the same kids. Tomorrow there is a group trip to Kew. With the same kids.