Is there any evidence that home education/ taking your child out of school improves outcomes for SEN children?

[GnomeDavid]

I do have real life experience of this and I have a lot of empathy for parents of SEN children who struggle to attend school or experience EBSA.
But I also see a lot of parents pull their children out of school (in my opinion) prematurely. Some are able to go back to school, but I imagine many don’t.
I wonder if there is any evidence that these children end up happier, well adjusted and less impacted by the co-morbidities of poor mental health, depression, anxiety and predisposition to eating disorders.
I assumed that you would be switching one less than ideal situation for a different one. Yet there is no option to explore both paths. Certainly I see a lot of unhappy SEN children in mainstream schools, but I also know some deeply unhappy children who are out of school, and the impact on their parents is also huge in terms of losing jobs, independence, social life, relationships, relationships with their other children.
I suppose I made a choice that my daughter would have to stay in school, even though she doesn’t thrive, as this seemed to have a lesser impact on the family as a whole. But I think about whether I made the right choice every day, and tomorrow is never guaranteed.
I would love to do a longitudal study of this but I imagine the environmental factors would make it almost impossible to measure reliably.

Yup. It’s giving a false sense of fairly cheap security to beurocrats who don’t seem to be able to look at the evidence - home educated kids are no more likely to suffer abuse and neglect than kids under 5 and school age kids

Purely about being seen to do something, even if the something isn't going to make a jot of difference when endless opportunities to actually do something useful are missed.

Cheaper than properly funding social services so these repeated mistakes by staff with no hope of keeping up with their workload stop happening no doubt...

This 👏👏

My daughter doesn't have an SEN diagnosis but she is a tricky one - academically she is years ahead, emotionally she is years behind where most 11 year olds are (she seems pretty on track for where 11 year olds were when I was 11, mid 2000s, but they seem to be growing up so quickly these days).

She came out of school in year 5 and even at that point, some of the girls in her class were starting to exclude and make catty comments about the girls who weren't wearing make up and didn't follow fashion etc. Couple that with a huge social media incident involving DD, who doesn't have any social media herself, and we took her out pretty quickly.

She's absolutely thriving in home ed. If we had access to a small secondary with good provision for MAT pupils, we'd enrol her in a heartbeat, but she loves being home educated and is making incredible progress, which the LA are aware of and very happy with.

And of course, giving actual quality support to home educators is quite out of the question - how DARE we have opted out (or in many cases been forced out before our children came to serious harm) of their shit show

I can understand why people do, my son is absolutely not in the right setting and has been refused a special school placement. I can see why those in similar positions will pull their kids out but I just don’t know how they do it. I’d be an awful teacher for him.

This must be a very difficult subject to meaningfully study since schools vary so much in the quality of education they provide - and the level of stress/trauma they inflict - and children's needs and temperaments vary so much.
Plus of course the home situation can vary.

The children who are removed from school to home educate would likely have done very badly at school, or not attended - whereas the ones who are managing at school tend to stay.
It's not like you can randomly assign children to home ed or school ed.

Personally my child is thriving at home, personally, socially and educationally - and I would never send them back to a school.

I can only speak anecdotally, Mine did not cope with the transition to senior school in a large academy so we took him out for three years.
He went back in, Had missed nothing. Was put into middle sets, Which to be fair is what I was in at school so no surprises there. And has gone on to complete GCSE’s A-levels and a degree from a redbrick university in a subject that we didn’t teach him at home at all.

Only anecdotal. During Covid my daughter’s school did a fantastic completely online program. The teachers taught live online and then students had work time. Overall student outcomes are reported to have suffered, but she soared. She has ASD and being in a classroom environment is stressful. The peace and quiet of being at home combined with the independent study nature of the work was ideal. It wasn’t home education as she still had a teacher for every subject. It was just education done at home, without the difficulties created by other students.

Sorry, I've not read the whole thread but this kind of blanket statement is just not true. Very few home-ed children are 'removed from Society' and if they are I'd argue that the home-ed title is being used to cover other motives.

From what I've seen home education is as varied as parents and children. It really does depend on the reasons why a child is struggling and the kind of alternative provision put in place. For many home-ed children that means they're as much a part of society as any other child it's just on different terms. So their schooling might involve home ed groups, other community groups, Forest school set ups, local sports/arts/chess/drama groups, mixed aged activities, tutoring groups etc.

I think the biggest difference for ND kids being home schooled is that socializing can be tailored to their specific needs in terms of environment, duration of activity, sensory triggers etc. This actually builds resilience/tolerance rather than pushing them to crisis levels of anxiety and a burn out situation. It's a bit like staged exposure therapy implemented at the child's pace so as the child matures they learn more effective strategies to cope with the world, allowing them to access the opportunities they need.

The other thing to bear in mind in terms of preparing kids for the world of work is that traditional schooling - a large, diverse cohort all grouped together for 11-13 years with no real option to opt out - is not replicated anywhere else in adult life (unless you end up incarcerated or join the military). Even quite regulated work environments offer far more flexibility than this - and even if they don't you at least have the possibility of choosing a different job/ career.

Back to OP. You are obviously trying to do the best you can for your child within the constraints of your family situation - finances, risk to future earning power, your own abilities, child's temperament, other family member's needs etc - and as a parent there's not much more you can do than that. Your child may not be thriving in school at the moment but things could improve as she matures/ expands her friendships and there will be benefits in terms of easier access to qualifications.

Would her outcome be better if she was home ed? There's little point thinking about it if there really is no option to do it. Most home ed parents of SN children I've encountered are only taking this path as a final option (often at massive personal cost to them and their family) after all other strategies have failed. For them the alternative is complete non-attendance and/or extremely mentally unwell kids so comparing future outcomes between the two groups feels pretty redundant for them.

I'm not electively home educating, it is very much forced upon me! Kids are still on roll at a mainstream primary, we haven't deregistered. Council have fought us every step of the way. We have had pointless mediation, where the person turning up isn't authorised to make any decisions. We are on tribunal waiting lists over a year long. One child is now finally hopefully going to a state special school, but the council are trying to push for a cheaper srp option. The other child has had 8 schools now say they can't meet needs and eotis is still being denied, despite being considerably cheaper than the ludicrously expense private school they are currently consulting with. Not that I believe they will say they can meet need anyway.

If we had more support and flexibility earlier on, I fully believe that things wouldn't have got this far for at least one of them. The amount the council must be spending to fight us while providing no one an education is staggering.

Elective Home Education for us was forced. As for evidence its so individual but for us at least the difference is night and day. Ds went from non verbal and severe behavioural issues to being able to functionally communicate and no longer displaying challenging behaviour. He also has epilepsy and has been virtual seizure free since he left school. The stress he was under was making him ill. We have been able to focus on his communication, build his confidence and he's now becoming a far more independent young man. All the support he needed that we provide was in his ehcp but not provided despite numerous attempts to enforce it.

There are too many variables. All I can say is I have spent 4 years battling to keep DD in school. I know if I had taken her out she would have withdrawn from the world completely. It’s taken me losing my job and battling every day to get her support in school though to make it happen. If school had the resources earlier on I think we could be in the position we are in now, although she never managed to go back FT.
she had a friend like her who was struggling to attend. She spent most of a year in a support room working on a computer alone and then just never came back to school apart from one day. I saw her mum and at one point she hadn’t left the house for over a year. I don’t think she was doing any work either.

Screens but also schools having fewer disciplinary options and becoming noisier and more chaotic as a result.

One of DS classmates was removed to home ed. He was a bright enough kid but terrible behaviour (impulsive, disobedient and would hit other kids/be too physical with them). Parents were very "gentle parent" and fought school trying to impose any consistent boundaries.

Worryingly he's now seemingly gone really off radar. I think he sees very little of other children socially and still isn't learning to follow rules/adhere to boundaries.

There's no easy answer to this. Discipline policies won't help behaviour based in a different need. Yet, if school can't help support the kid properly then it's not going to work. I imagined the kid had SEN needs beyond that you may have been aware.

The current system is so rigid I wonder how most kids cope. I rarely if ever hear any secondary school kid tell me they like school. This is NT kids.

We didn't have this detention policy approach to every minor issue in my day. It's become the totally wrong tool to address everything.

It's not the teachers fault either most the time. The system is set against them.

I look at the homework my teen has and just question continually what is this bullshit. What's the use in that rubbish.

I wish someone with a brain would overhaul the entire system and it would solve a multitude of problems. We have emotionally dead boarding school raised buffoons dictating this for our kids and we are all seen as the problem if we dare question it.

I would ideally have loved a Flexi type system for my teen where they just don't have to study the more bollocks subjects of less importance imo.