Stop homeschooling your children.

[pentagonisapentagon]

I run an educational consultancy and exam company. We produce books that most parents in our area of education will purchase. Home educating your children makes us money.

However. STOP. Now I don’t mean those that have children with severe issues (this is a small %, everyone likes to diagnose their children with some form of disorder and it isn’t those I’m talking about) who would benefit out the classroom / often awaiting a better school option.

I mean the parents who are tired with the education system - lots of moans that they can’t take their children for a holiday, annoyed about not being allowed make up, the rules being too hard. You can barely spell, stop trying to teach your children yourself. These children are being FAILED by their parents.

By all means, if you have the relationship, time, ability and means to provide a solid home education system (inc money for tutors which will be needed) - go ahead. Just ensure you’re covering the social aspect.

I am seeing the advice to home school EVERYWHERE. Mumsnet and Facebook filled with the poor advice. It’s detrimental to all parties involved.

I’d love to know others thoughts on this.

@WatermelonWaveclub thank you, that’s interesting. I don’t think it would work for me but interesting to see how people make it work.

@Anonymous2025

Why? I don’t think it’s the best option for either of us. My daughter is (generally) happy at school and doing well and has good friendships and I think she struggle to self motivate at home.

I am a single parent, my job is extremely high pressure and I basically can’t take any time away from it between 6am and about 7pm and I am in the office three days a week. I wouldn’t be able to set work or assess it, wouldn’t have time to plan lessons or go anywhere during the day.

If she was struggling socially or academically or being bullied it would be a different matter but I’m not going to heap more stress and disruption on myself if there’s no need.

I can see lots of scenarios where HE is the best option but I don’t think it should be assumed to be the best option by default in all scenarios.

I can’t provide it because it’s not publicly available. It will be soon through Gov consultation.

No…they weren’t… the greatest minds were teachers who then bestowed upon the next and the next.

Plato taught Aristotle etc.

Worrying you think this eeek

I completely agree with you that there are lots of factors involved in weighing up a situation as to the best option for educating your DC.

My youngest goes to school and sometimes I have a pang of guilt over not giving her what her brother had. But I have fought to get her in the best school to meet her needs, most days she is happy and I know it would be much harder for me in my current situation to home educate. Overall the best thing for us all is for her to attend school.

I'm not talking about the greatest minds, I'm talking about ordinary people at home. Lots of women.

And a bit worrying (eeek 😂) you think Plato lived a hundred years ago!!

@Floortile no, I worked for an LA. If you had read my post you would know that I don't any longer.

I do not, and never have, thought that the majority of HE DCs are always at home.
That is your own projection.

My post said that DCs can be abused at school, though the checks in place make it more difficult.

Pre school DCs see midwives and later, health visitors.

At no point did I say that teachers are keeping an eye on DCs. My post was very clear to differentiate between HE ers who do a fantastic job vs those who abuse their DCs.

@Elleherd I cannot speak of the case you wrote about. I can tell you that I worked very closely with Drs, hospitals, Police and schools (where appropriate). To the extent that I had a direct line to all of them.

No, I was neither EW or CPW.

I have 1 home educated child and 1 in school and another 2 kids. We are not Anti School but we are pro education and my child being able to access an education without having a meltdown or becoming suicidal again, or suffering due to his significant SEN needs that are not addressed in school as there are not the facilities or the budget to adequately provide for these children.
You have a very high opinion considering you don't appear to know that there is a significant difference between Home Education and HomeSchooling.
Regarding the advice to not let the local authority into your home for an assessment is very valid. We have suffered absolute hell from the hospital throwing about false accusations and making threats based on their assumptions of knowing something about our lives. Our home is also our children's safe space, we will not be allowing that space to be destroyed by someone who thinks they know it all from the local authority.
School is not the Pinnacle and does not have an bearing on a person's intelligence, the honest to God dumbest people I have ever met were all those with master degrees and Drs. Being learned and able to memorize information to pass a test is not intelligence.
Schools can be extremely damaging to many children you cannot criticise the majority of Home Ed parents who had no other choice but to take on facilitating their children's education themselves.

Completely agree! Of course there are children who struggle with the school system and maybe home ed is best for them (although it must be very hard for the parents) but I work at a secondary school and there has been a massive increase in EHE cases in recent years - and in most cases I really don't see how it is in the child's best interests.

I think Covid has a lot to do with this - and increased anxiety and stress among teenage students. The local GPs won't diagnose this for schoolchildren so if the kids can't face school they get sanctions and fines. The parents then give up and take the kids out - even though most work and are not even there to 'homeschool' their children.

Our school does have a separate facility for children who can't access mainstream full time, and there are other options such as reduced timetables. But I find it really hard to imagine most of the children are getting a decent education at home. We are in a very blue-collar/deprived area and these parents are not academic or even at home, in most cases.

The LA does investigate and will make rulings for x child to attend such and such school - because they realise this - but it probably takes two years to get to that stage, by which time the child has missed so much! It's a real problem, and getting worse.

I've also seen it at primary school and think it's probably less of an issue then, and parents are likely at home - although the socialisation side of things might be a concern. But at secondary I do think it's a massive problem!

Doesn't sound like they're getting a good education at school either @Teenagehorrorbag - stress, anxiety, sanctions, fines. And then loads of them fail their GCSEs anyway.

Did you not say in a previous post?:
"The unique concern with HE is that DCs are always at home, giving greater opportunity for abuse, if an older member of the family, or an acquaintance, is abusing a child."

Yes, the level of cognitive dissonance on mumsnet when it comes to education is interesting.

It’s an absolute hot bed of massive threads from teachers/ex teachers/tas about how awful it is working in schools, how they don’t get to do a good job, how awful behaviour is, how much time is wasted during the day,

as well as loads of threads about how crap people’s kids schools are, how they don’t understand SEND, bullying is terrible, the teachers are shit, the work is too hard or too easy or too much or too little, the uniform is stupid, the rules are too strict or the kids are allowed to be feral and on and on…

yet mention EHE and suddenly the teachers are all knowing paragons of learning who can and will provide excellent teaching and any child out of school is missing out on wonderful opportunities for wholesome socialising.

Yes! Honestly all these people saying HE is awful and the kids will fail etc… go and have a look at some of the threads on The Staffroom. Or on Secondary Education. Or just generally on Chat and AIBU. Most teachers hate working in schools. Behaviour is appalling. Bullying is rife. Kids are failing anyway. Threads on here are the major reason I have sold my house, downsized and we are moving to a cheaper area so our kids can go to an independent school. If we couldn’t do that, id be home educating.

OK I'm not trying to generalise as all cases are different - but I do think there are a lot of parents who take their children out of school because of issues such as anxiety, which could maybe be handled in school if everyone worked together. That is certainly the case in my school which has an amazing alternative provision facility.

I'm thinking about secondary school aged kids.

The government rules about attendance and fines don't help, in my view. It just drives parents to take their children out to avoid the fines - understandably - and often they can't then provide the required support.

Well off and educated parents choosing to EHE, or parents with SEN children who need more than mainstream can provide - fine. But I think the increase now is more about parents whose children need a bit more support, and EHE really is not the answer for many of these. It's a growing trend across the country, and in many cases, I'm not sure it's helping the children involved.

Ther are home ed groups who meet up for learning and social and outside school sports classes

Well…how convenient.

issues such as anxiety, which could maybe be handled in school if everyone worked together.

Yes, in a world where the situation was completely different then the situation would be completely different…

Sadly parents are stuck with the reality of schools as they are, not how people would like them to be.

This is spot on.
Along with the reality that the last thing half the parents and teachers slating Home ed want, is disruptive, volatile, high level anxiety, poor MH, struggling, or SEN kids, who have been withdrawn from school, to be put in their childrens classes or share resources with them.

The problem is really with the education system though isn’t it?
I’ve worked in a school so have seen it from the inside and seen how some kids really struggle. Even my now-adult DCs say their school (secondary) was not right for them in many ways, although they both did well academically. I could never have home-schooled though, not patient or clever enough. I do believe children need to be socialised but I also know there are HE groups out there where that does occur.
i know of a few HE kids who are doing well now but their parents are very clever and did all the right things in terms of education/socialisation.
If a child is just left in front of TV all day that is not home Ed.

Yes! No one wants SEND children in their children’s classes- they are apparently all naughty, violent, loud, disruptive, needy, scary, gross, get unfair advantages, slow the pace down etc etc.

The same goes for any child exhibiting any kind of trauma induced behaviour.

So parents have children who aren’t welcome in mainstream, aren’t provided with suitable alternative settings and are then lambasted for ending up home educating.

There is literally no way to win in that situation, except to ignore what everyone thinks of you, your child, your parenting and your ‘choices’ and just do what makes your child as happy as is possible while hoping for the best.

Mine are adults but if I had children now I would be home schooling and not exposing the children to left wing educators who are pushing transgender and a system that is churning out snowflakes.

Bingo 😂

Many of us start out very much from that last paragraph, but then adapt it to; do the best we can to create a successful happy education intertwined with life, and do everything we can to game our hopes.
I can understand others staying stuck at the beginning.

As others have described the problem is rooted in the school system which is very clearly failing many children, particularly, though not exclusively those with anxiety, neurodiversity and those who struggle with peers.

I do absolutely understand why parents of such children take the decision to HE and I think in many of these cases those children will thrive with HE.

What troubles me is the lack of differentiation between two extremes with the general rhetoric around HE: there’s a huge gulf between the diligent and committed parents who are pulling together a creative home curriculum and those parents who have just pulled their kids out because they lack the resources or energy to deal with absences or the output of mental health issues. And this needs to be called out. They are not both good examples of HE.

If you go into most of the Facebook groups for HE they seem the be targeting the second category; the rhetoric is all about how to avoid the LA, why the LA has no business interfering etc. There is very little discussion about the actual content of the HE programme or what children should be taught.

I am sure there are instances where the LA is overbearing and inefficient and fails to understand the nuances of children with complex needs. I’m sure there are situations where removing a child, even without a proper structured programme of HE may in the short term be valid.

But it worries me that families are being encouraged to pursue a “us against the Man” approach whereby any approach to HE is valid as long as it sticks two fingers up to the “system”. It’s not a constructive approach for the children and it gives parents a false sense of their own capabilities.

I would like to see an approach that empowers the people who can HE well to do so but also acknowledges that for stressed parents working full time to pull a depressed or school refusing child out of school to allow them to spend hours on YouTube indefinitely and say “it’s all learning” doesn’t help the child.

I really don’t want to minimise how dreadful this must be for parents. But the “fuck you” approach to the LA without any serious attempt to design a credible plan is not a good solution.

Maybe the school could have managed it, maybe not. By the time parents remove through things like anxiety, the school has generally already failed to work together well enough to succeed in handling it in school, even when they've tried. Resources are stripped to the bone.

I've seen this play out locally so many times.
Handling it in school is generally done with the cheapest (often well meant) methods available, which don't address what's going on with the child. Very few benefit from a reduced timetable easier activities social stories sticking plaster system. Schools feel rejected, because they were providing something.

Lots of signposting noises happens. Parents follow up and join queues of between 2 to 5 years on average. The Dc meantime usually gets stuck onto a reduced timetable forcing the parent out of their job, or less hours, leaving less money. Financial home strains exacerbate childs MH.
The parent by then owes fines for poor attendance already and is being harassed to pay them out of much reduced income. Things at home are tense, child deteriorates further.
The child now attends internal units and is no longer studying a standard syllabus. Reducing the hours and quality of work fails to cure the child. The work provided is poor quality and depresses child who feels they're failing in life. Parents wonder how this work is educating child. Child finds social story work doesn't cure them and frustrating that it should be believed to

Deteriorating child starts absenting themselves from agreed reduced schooling. Parent gets more fines for missing poorer schooling, child breaks more at home.
Parent starts letting child stay home in order to hang onto the bit of work they still have instead of child wrangling.
Parent sees their not getting an education at school, fines are financially breaking parent, child is getting worse in huge queue for actual help.

Parent is exhausted from fighting for better that they can't get, family is financially destroyed. Parent sees only answer to end the cycle of damage is to withdraw kid. School breathes sigh of relief, notifies LA, turns to next kid...

What people aren't looking at is how much of the rise in school anxiety is likely being caused by overuse of SLANT, OTT rules, silence in corridors, OTT uniform requirements, regimented movement and behaviors, etc in the midst of mid level disruption. It's aimed at controlling one set of kids who are unbothered by it, and potentially accidentally damaging another who are.

Us too- we were pushed into EHE because our ND, physically disabled and chronically ill child couldn’t cope, but we love it now. I can’t think how we ever used to manage school!

DS is only just turned 10 so long term success is unknown at the moment, but the last 3 years definitely are successful!