A wave of illiterate “home schooled” children

[RedSkyatNight25]

Prepared to get torn apart, and I know many homeschool because the school environment isn’t right for their children (SEN, sensory issues - whatever else) and their needs aren’t met by school with a chronic lack of SEN placements and too much demand etc. I’m not naive to that. I also know some parents with adequate resource will ensure their children have a rounded education whilst being homeschooled.

But there seems to be a movement to homeschooling by people who are simply anti establishment with a point to prove. Their grammar and communication on social media tells me they’re not equipped to homeschool a child. Not least I think the socialisation and soft skills school provides are hugely important too. I suspect most of these parents either haven’t considered the benefits of school or hugely underestimated it, especially past primary are parents really equipped to teach ALL the subjects with sufficient skill if they lack the knowledge themselves? Are they not underestimating the skills and expertise of qualified teachers?

AIBU to think it’s really concerning? These are the next generation of our workforce and infrastructure. I personally think we are hugely privileged to live in a country with free education - I know it’s not perfect but I’m not convinced homeschooling is better for a vast majority.

I'm a home educator, and I agree to some extent.

While a parent, or whoever is facilitating the education, absolutely does not need to be super intelligent or a qualified teacher, it does concern me when in the many home education groups I am in, there is a serious lack of basic spelling and punctuation. I make typing errors occasionally, sure - it's hard on a small screen and autocorrect does you dirty sometimes - but when I see 'dose my child need to do this for there report', I do cringe a little inside because unless they're using tutors, they are going to be repeating those very basic errors to their children.

I'm university educated, but when it comes to areas I'm not entirely sure about (e.g. maths), I will do the research first and learn it so I can help him (along with online videos and resources. The good thing is I am learning too - and things I struggled with at GCSE, I am relearning alongside him!

However, re: curriculum. We didn't follow the ccurriculum when he was younger, and went down an interest-led path. Hes now studying towards a few igcses, and is doing absolutely fine. He's not the most academic child, and wouldn't be going to university even if he was at school, but he's absolutely going to have good enough results to go to college to do a vocational course or do an apprenticeship.

Rubbish.

I agree with you. The only kid I know who was HS went to primary school initially (web my daughter) and her (recently intelligent, hippy-dippy) mum home schooled her and her brother for senior school. She went to Oxford and is now a lawyer. He has his own business and dabbled in local politics. Really wonderful, well-adjusted young people and a happy success all round.

In general, though, I would be concerned that some people are simply not up the job of educating kids. I’d also fear that ‘odd’ kids who ‘don’t fit in’ would get odder without socialisation and grown into adults who are not equipped for the real world of working life.

@LittleYellowQueen

They need to sort that out first before looking at elective home edders. You say it's shockingly easy to opt out of education with no oversight - It's shockingly easy for schools and LAs to opt out of educating children with additional needs. The government shouldn't be allowing this, but they are.

I agree its a total mess. Children are being failed on a huge scale by schools.

But I still don’t see this as a justification for the fact that there is no legal requirement, once a child is deregistered, for any real oversight with any teeth by the Local Authority.

You absolutely do have a choice! You may choose the easier option of sending a few photos or whatever to keep them off your back but that isn’t the same as it being required. They cannot issue an SAO simply because a parent won’t send some photos to them.
You originally queried why a poster hadn’t looked up the LA requirements, they were in fact correct in what they were saying.

The job applications that I'm referring to are for people applying for jobs educating children over the course of the last 30 years.

So, I don't think that we should conclude that attending school means you leave mostly literate and home educated kids finish their education mostly illiterate.

The home school community are a mixed bunch. When I did it, there were lots of parents ferrying their children for 1-2-1s in Oxford/Cambridge for ancient Greek and Latin instruction. Many of them co tutored and pooled resources so the science grads would run classes with groups of children whose parents, in turn, would tutor in English or history. We did lots of homeschool visits to the London museums. Some were child actors on BBC/film productions, one who lived in my road was a tennis prodigy on a LTA scholarship and training programme that meant homeschooling was easier to fit around 4hours a day coaching/training.There are loads of online resources and even online schools like Kings InterHigh. When my DD returned to school after a year she was a couple of years ahead of her peers because she’d had 3hours concentrated quality ed every day and no struggling with large classes/ poor behaviour/ teachers taking register and doing crowd control.

However, there was definitely a group of ant-establishment hippy types who’d pitch up at the ice skating and picnics and who were about ‘unschooling’. Within the community you gravitate towards those that share your values and aims and I have to say the ones who really weren’t trying to educate their kids were in the minority.

This is just as much bullshit as claiming that all home ed parents are highly educated, going to groups, hiring tutors and ending up with high achieving children.

IF a parent deregister there is already a process IF the school / LA believes this is not in the child's best interest. The process already exists.

It's so interesting - because the wave I've noticed on social media, is the number of home educators that are ex- teachers!

Like anything - there is a wide spectrum. There are those that excel at school and those that leave with little to no GCSE's coupled with trauma.

Likewise, Home-educators are made up of the type of families the OP mentioned; however they are also made up of families, whose children start their GCSE exams at 12 and stagger them throughout their teen years.

@LittleYellowQueen I’m sorry for your experience and I wasn’t meaning to undermine the experience of families like yours. We have a SEN child in our family (my step child), but because their needs are so great they have always been in a specialist setting, they have always been prioritised by CAHM’s etc and received a great deal of support because putting it kindly, they are on the extreme end of SEN with extremely challenging behaviour. They attended a specialist preschool. I know not every family is so “lucky” (if you can say that) in the support they get and I know those children who are not quite as extreme in their needs but also not suitable for mainstream are being let down.

My child who attended school couldn't tell the time either. School didn't care to meet their needs and teach in a way they needed

What a load of rubbish! Sure home ed has its issues as spoken about on this thread but this kind of sweeping statement just makes you look a bit(dare I say it?) uneducated.

I am not sure what evidence the OP has for her view.

It is not my experience. Home schoolers of my acquaintance seem more committed to their children's education than those of us who just drop them off at the school gate.

There are networks of homeschoolers to ensure social interaction, and home schooled children are also members of sports clubs, Scouts etc like any other children.

What the homeschooling parents are trying to avoid is the rigid one-size-fits-all approach where tiny children who can barely sit still are forced to learn things they are not ready for. And they can take their children on an educational trip without getting fined by our police state!

One homeschooling child of my acquaintance (now adult) is a famous surgeon in the US. The children do not miss out. They often take some GCSEs and then go on to 6th form or technical colleges and proceed from there like any other young person, having had the precious asset of a proper childhood with freedom to explore their interests at their own pace.

How does homeschooling in the UK work? Are there any yearly? checks with a school? to see what the child has been doing and what skills they have learnt?

Indeed. I know of one friend with a daughter with Down's Syndrome and a relative with a daughter with Rett Syndrome. Extremely clear and apparent physical and mental impairment. They have to fight for every bit of support and to ensure they are in the right setting.

I'm both a teacher and have (at various points) home-schooled my kids - one for a year when he was eight and another for two blocks of three months when she was a teenager. In each case it was to do with mental health. Neither became school refusers (that's what I was aiming to avoid).

One of the issues with home schooling is that there's no oversight. You can pull your kids out of school and no one is going to check up on you. This is a really big safeguarding issue, particularly in deprived communities where parents / carers take the decision to home-school because they can't be bothered to get up in the morning, wash the uniform, make sure little Johnny has what they need, etc. Essentially, everyone knows that in some circumstances 'home-schooling' is code for legalised neglect. The government, via the DfE, needs to introduce statutory frameworks to protect these children's right to an education. Because this is what we're talking about: education is a human right (as defined in human rights legislation).

Secondly, yes there are problems in the education system and wider society, huge problems, but the solution isn't always home education. What actually happens when a child is home educated is that they become isolated (doesn't matter how many activities you do with them) from the rest of the world because the rest of the world is operating according to certain norms of behaviour. People might not like these ordinary ways of doing things that we all learn after 11 years in education, that's fine, they might want little Johnny to forge ahead on his own path, but 90% of the people and systems he's going to come into contact with in his adult life have all been moulded by this 11 years. In other words, to draw on Freud, John the man is going to find himself feeling less at home in the world. What other people have internalised and naturalised is going to be unfamiliar to him. And while home education might have instilled certain strengths in him, he's still going to be a stranger in a strange land and he'll have to learn to navigate that.

Finally, and I think this is my biggest bugbear, I don't think most people have the knowledge to be able to deliver learning. I teach humanities. Very very occasionally I might cover a physics class. I've got a GCSE in physics, but I literally don't have the expertise that a degree and a masters confers. Christonabike, I even once covered a carpentry class. I can put up shelves, but I can't do dovetails. Sure, home educating parents can cover the spec to get their kids through the exams, but that's not the same as actually educating children. Instead, it's feeding information into a system (like a Chatgpt prompt) to get it to spit out a result. In other words, it's creating the very conditions that they're supposedly trying to escape from, i.e. treating people as cogs in machines. To that extent, it highlights a flawed logic at best, and a complete misunderstanding at the other end of the extreme.

All that said, I do believe huge numbers of parents are home educating to try and cope with a horrific increase in childhoodo and adolscent mental health crises. Fundamentally, this is what I think needs to be addressed with more support both inside and outside of school.

I am a home educator.

Not through choice, but because my child has SEN and was not coping in school. Her teacher told me that in a typical class of 30, 6 children will have SEN. There is no TA.

It is simply not possibly to deliver a lesson that suits every child’s needs, and if your child doesn’t fit the “one size fits all” method then they, and their education, will suffer. This is not a dig at teachers or schools, who I am sure are trying their absolute best with no time and no resources. The system needs significant overhaul.

I would love nothing more than for my daughter to be able to thrive in school, to be happy and go running in to meet her friends but the reality is so different for her, and her mental health was declining rapidly. I think the statistic is something like autistic children are 7 times more likely to die by suicide than their NT peers, and a lot of that is to do with not fitting in or masking so hard that they eventually crumble.

So, I home ed. I am degree educated but I am well aware that I’m not a teacher so I have to throw money at it. Online platforms, tutors, equine therapy, forest schools, home ed groups, the right resources. We follow the curriculum for core subjects, and she learns languages and humanities alongside.

Maybe she won’t come out with 10 GCSE’s, but she will come out with at least five and with her mental health intact. Hopefully she will receive more support in further education later down the line.

Some of us are just trying to do our best with the hand we’ve been dealt.

The cynic in me thinks that if they had legal power and end up in a tribunal/court demanding that evidence, then the parent can come back with “actually, I want my kid in school…. You haven’t provided them with any form of suitable education “.

One of DD’s friends isn’t in school because they can’t guarantee her safety. She’s chronically depressed ,self harming and suicidal. Mainstream doesn’t suit her. Smaller units are aimed at SLD or children with significant behavioural issues. She’s a very smart, well behaved kid. Parents have had to hide all sharps and she’s constantly with someone at home. CAHMS fucking useless. No medication because she’s too young. A dozen other issues. The LA doesn’t give a shit.

School is about so much more than academia. A relative is homeschooling a 4 year old and also due to have a baby.
I wonder how much schooling will go on. Also to deny the child friends of her own age seems unkind. Competative Grannies arent the same as having your own friends.

In theory, you notify the local authority that you are choosing to homeschool your children and they are supposed to check in. I was advised to keep a log of what we were covering. I did this, but not once did anyone contact us and ask to see a copy of her curriculum or proof of participation in online school programmes. It was over ten years ago and I suspect after recent tragedies/post covid there may be more oversight, but I suspect there is a little bit of classism/snobbery. We lived in a big house/posh postcode/assumption of educated parents so they probably could care less, but had we been living in a rundown housing estate on UC, they might have been more proactive in checking on my DD.

I live in Austria where education is compulsory but not school. This is in contrast to Germany where school is compulsory from age 6 to 18.
I live near the border to Germany and during the pandemic we had several families move here so that they could withdraw the children for school. All of them were doing it for anti-establishment/anti-corona measures. There are also many Austrian families who have withdrawn children from school since the pandemic ended for anti-establishment reasons. (And yes, they have told me this).
I'm a maths tutor and I have ended up tutoring several of these children. By the time they come to me they've usually lost a year or two of schooling and all of them are miles behind in their maths.
Austria has a system where you are welcome to homeschool but at the end of the year every homeschooled child has to go in to a local primary or secondary school and sit tests in the major subjects (English, German, Maths, Science, Geography, History etc.). If they don't pass they have to return to school and they will then sit some more tests to find out which year they need to restart in.
A couple of the families I was tutoring refused to allow the children to sit their tests and they were taken to court and had to return to the school year they had left and ended up 2 years behind their peers.

I have nothing against homeschooling at all but I do think there needs to be ways of checking on the standards of the children and compulsory return to schooling if they are not meeting an adequate standard. (SEN would have to be taken into account of course).
I sometimes think on MN that people imagine homeschooled children happily learning with very well-educated parents teaching them or excellent tutors or small groups of parents getting together to share their expertise. This can be wonderful for the children and works well for many.
But unfortunately not all of them are like that. There is definitely a "wave" of it in Austria. I can't speak for the UK. The OP has seen a lot of it on social media but it's difficult to judge from that because the more you click on videos like that, the more videos you are shown and you can end up thinking that huge numbers of people are doing it and that huge numbers of them have poor educational standards themselves.

I remember watching one of those lunchtime chat show type things and someone was defending homeschooling passionately. They had hired several qualified tutors and had a great community of (wealthy) home schooling families with their own tutors so they could cooperate and had the means to get all types of science labs and specialists. It sounded fantastic. Unfortunately an average home schooled kid does not have that, that's why home schooling requirements still needs to be discussed.

Yes,when I home educated we had visits from the LEA it was a former teacher who would just check in and write a little report in addition to my reports too, my son was always very pleased to see her and would keep things ready to show ‘Magaret’ when she next visited and he would read to her (she didn’t ask him to,but would oblige) and she would bring him copious amounts of elastic bands for the elastic band ball he was making (he befriended the local postman who kept him in constant supply on a weekly basis- who knew elastic band balls perish? I didn’t until it happened 😂🤣- he also son not postman, broke a glass part of the light fitting bouncing this huge Royal Mail sponsored ball in the living room) - we initially had a visit from someone else who I later discovered was checking their was no ‘abusive element’ to our decision.

I can only speak for my experience with my LA.

Once a year, the LA EHE team get in touch and ask for a home visit or, alternatively, a report showing the progress that has been made over the last year. I choose to send a report because I keep track of everything she's done in a huge spreadsheet and it's easier to write about her progress than try to explain it and risk forgetting something.

They assess the report to make sure it demonstrates progress in a range of areas, particularly literacy and numeracy. If they needed more information, they would then reply to ask for it. Some LAs ask for pictures and samples of work - this isn't a legal requirement and my LA does not ask for this.

Aside from that, they get in touch frequently throughout the year with details of classes, events and groups that might be of interest and to discuss some of the support they can offer (home ed kids here can increase the number of books they're allowed out of the library at any one time, for example, and you can get discounts on Nat Trust etc).