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.

'external social influences being interactions hand-curated by your parents'?? Eh?? Just read that out to DS - he's laughing his head off! 😂

It’s hilarious isn’t it.
Such ignorance as to what HE actually is and what our children do.
There have been so many of these types of threads on MN in recent years and always the same stereotypes get trotted out by people who have no clue.

"everyone likes to diagnose their children with some form of disorder"

Not entirely sure with this take I'd be taking your advice here.

Exactly. Why would I have wanted my child to be autistic, when it causes him so many problems in life? The diagnosis helps him get the support and understanding he needs (he has an EHCP), but I would never have chosen this for him. Such a weird take that everyone apparently wants their child to be diagnosed with something. We just want our children to get the support they need.

From what I can see this is a fair summary.

A lot of parents have drunk the insta kool-aid that making children do anything they don’t want to is abuse, along with a healthy dose of conspiracy about ‘the system’ and also encouragement to believe any trait in their child outside of the extreme typical must be neurodiversity. As a result the kid is left to their own devices all day, unlimited screen time, because they need it to ‘regulate’ and their only trips out are to the soft play. They call their approach child led and they seem so pleased with themselves but honestly these kids are massively underdeveloped, overstimulated and undersocialised. Very sad to see, but what can you say?

I am actually quite shocked by the of the comments on here and astounded that people can make such assumptions and judgements about home education with little personal experience. I was part of the home Ed community for 15 years and attended numerous groups and activities alongside my children. In that time I simply did not see the kind of parenting people are describing or impact on children that people are suggesting. As both a former teacher and therapist who worked in education for many years, I saw a huge amount of dysfunction in both peer relationships and engagement with education in my time working in schools. My own children and their home educated peers have successfully moved on to 6th form, done extremely well there and many, like DS1 are at Russell group universities and several at Cambridge. DS1 feels he is better equipped than many of his university friends to manage his work and social life there, partly from his varied life experiences. He has a house arranged for next year with the uni friends he lives with in college, is going on holiday abroad with them in the summer and is having a fantastic social life. And this was a child who refused to go to primary school and is dyslexic, didn't read fluently until age 11, but still achieved amazing results while being home educated and got 3 A stars and one A for his A levels, which were the top results in his state school sixth form. On top of this, for 5 years of home educating both DS I was a single parent managing both part time work and a part time masters degree around it all. I am now remarried and have a full time job and am enjoying the independence. DS2 is at 6th form doing 4 A levels, is predicted 4 A stars and is confidently applying to Cambridge. He loves his subjects and manages all of his own life and workload with a greater degree of independence than many peers whose children went to school. So please stop judging when you don't have direct experience. And I'm interested to know, for those critical of home education, what you might say about my story.

👏 Quite!! I don't fit into any of those categories and neither do most of the HE families I've known during my 17 years of HE.

Sorry to piss on your party sometimesnot but me and my DH are working class home educating parents. We have no education beyond college and we did not strictly timetable nor did we follow the national curriculum.

So I have no idea our our very social DD managed to get 9 GCSEs A*/A and on the Cambridge pathway at Sixth Form. Must be a miracle given we are clearly unqualified halfwits in your opinion.

I think life would be a lot better if we stopped trying to put people into ‘categories’, and instead realised that everyone has individual circumstances and reasons for choosing to home educate.

@Netcam similar story here. The two ex home ed young people on my eldest's course are the ones with distinctions.
I was a bit burnt out by A level, having being in formal education since 4 but they hit the ground running at college, juggling outside activities, social life and workload so much better than I had.

My child did go to 14-16 college, which someone stated was just like school. I think it benefited them being used to a college environment by the time they were 6th form age.

For me, the measure of was home ed successful is if they see the value of it when looking back. Reading what my eldest wrote for their UCAS personal statement I would say very much yes.

Each route has been different for each child. My eldest had something they excelled in that doing fewer GCSEs gave them an opportunity to live and breathe.
I had to laugh at the comment about carefully curated external activities as that child took themself off for an audition without running it by us, as they're so used to self direction, this resulted in a weekly 2hr round trip to drop them off to participate.

Their sibling doesn't have a passion like that and is more of an all rounder, so is focusing on a larger number of GCSEs for the time being.

Yes- do people really think that middle class parents with ‘philosophical idea’ about education don’t have children with SEND?

We are middle class, masters level educated professionals who have ‘philosophy’s’ about stuff and considered home ed, but decided to try mainstream education because we hoped ds would be one of the kids it served well, and I’m disabled so it was easier for me.

Turns out he has a million disabilities including PDA so it wasn’t to be…

Are we in the forced to home ed camp or the middle class ponce class?

And yet you yourself never learned the simple art of paragraphing.

Genuine question but how do you see that if they are home all day?

Tell me you’ve missed the point of the post without telling me you’ve missed the point of the post 🙄

I don’t even know where to start with the ignorance.

The sweeping statements and the stereotypes are strong 😂

Quite !

And if you are concerned about a child you should always report.

You mis-read it, they mean they don't use formal teaching.

erm… “no one attempts to categorise SCHOOL PARENTS????”

Haven you even BEEN on Mumsnet before? Grammar school parents, private school parents, middle class parents who move to game the system, parents who dont give a shit about their kid’s education - take your pick!

Netcam but you are also seeing it through your own lens. I am sure many will have the same experience you do. Many do not and many opt for HE to disengage from the scrutiny. That is not a judgement of your experience or the whole of the HE community but to pretend that there isn't an issue is dangerous.

You're right about the significant amount of safeguarding issues in school and that's the whole point. They are visible and they are on someone's radar.

Sadly, it doesn't seem to make a whole lot of difference, though.

You're right about the significant amount of safeguarding issues in school and that's the whole point. They are visible and they are on someone's radar.

I disagree that being in school means safeguarding issues are visible and on the radar.
Most girls report sexual assault or harassment in school. In one study this figure was as high as 99.7% of women and girls, in a study of over 22,000. Three girls a day are raped in school, and conviction rates are so low that the boys responsible basically get away with a telling off. Where’s the safeguarding? Are these behaviours on anyone’s radar?

A boy at school with dd used to grab girls bra straps, pull their hair, pretend to choke them and imitate other porny/sexual actions, on a regular basis. What did school do? Nothing. Called it monkey love - a boy mildly picking on a girl because he was clumsy in his communication.

How many schools deal effectively with bullying? How many children and teens live in misery? A reported 25% of all school children are victims of bullying. That’s about 2.5 million children. How many of them have to share space with their bully because schools minimise the issue and very often just don’t deal with it? Where’s the safeguarding in these cases?

How many SN children are failed in school, traumatised in school, treated as naughty children with shitty parents. How is this not a safeguarding issue! Yet many children (including my own son with ASD/ADHD/PDA) are removed from school as a last resort because no one in school wants to even try to put into place effective reasonable adjustments that by law they should be attempting. So many cases of discrimination against disabled children, but it relies on parents having the energy and time to take up these cases and fight the LA. But again, where’s the safeguarding to keep these children safe and able to access the education they have a right to access?

It’s all very well to call for more stringent check ups on HE families, because some might be abusive, but this completely ignores that many are HE because of abuse within school, by other children, by teachers, by the LA, and leads to an understandable fear of involvement from those individuals checking up on us, because many of them are ignorant to what has led families into these situations in the first place.

Of course there are going to be genuinely feckless parents of HE children, just like there are crap parents of schoolchildren. Society works like that.

You don’t get to call out all HE parents as a risk to their children though without at least acknowledging the risk that millions of children are taking by just going to school. In-school risk isn’t any less because it’s on someone’s radar - they’re still doing fuck all to improve the broken education system, and I’d say it’s far worse that adults in positions of authority and care of children and teens know what’s happening in schools every day and not only let it happen, but then criticise parents who’ve removed their children because they literally have no other options!

If you really have a problem with HE you need to tackle schools and education. Address the sexual harassment and bullying within schools. Address the lack of SN provision. Address the pressure children are now under. Address the mental health decline. Fix this and fewer children will be HE.

@RunnerRunnerDuck

Agree with your comments.

It’s very telling that the aibu poll on here is something like 25/75 in agreement with the ridiculous comment in the title ‘stop homeschooling your children’ (lol) and yet the majority of the responses are parents saying ‘well sort out the quality of education in the uk and we would but until then thanks but no thanks’.

Telling that the 75% mostly haven’t commented and just clicked ‘yanbu’ without any sort of discussion.

And also telling that comments against HE resort to the usual stereotypes of ‘feral’ and ‘abusive’ yet also ‘snowflakes’ and ‘privileged’! I mean you can’t win can you 😆

Runner I 100% agree with you. School has failed my child in so many ways, including keeping him safe. Home Ed means I now have a fulfilled happy child who is excelling

Yes this!!!

DD2 (15) is almost unrecognisable (but recognisable as how she was more often when she was younger) now she is home schooled (online school). Anxious, depressed and subdued and sleeping loads when she had managed to go into school for a time. Always struggling to get through homework and we had to prompt her with everything school related.

Today we are out at a medical appointment and were told it could be a long wait. Unbidden she brought her Biology text book with her and has done most of an assignment. Who is this person and what have you done with my daughter? 🙂

The time I have spent complaining , emailing and having endless meetings about DS's EHCP and how it is not fit for purpose, LA ignoring expert advice they have to follow by law, or school just not providing...I could have home educated DS.

Possibly to PhD level.