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.

Are you campaigning for better schools to meet the needs of children with SEN who have been forced to home Ed by the LA?
Or are you just targeting home ed

My post was not about Local Authorities monitoring home ed. The discussion has turned to that at points, amongst other considerations relevant to the discussion but it was not the premise of the post.

It was you who suggested the LA’s monitoring would result in an SAO should the child’s education not be considered sufficient, I merely observed that was a naive belief given the resources. I didn’t actually share a judgment as to what the LA should or shouldn’t be doing in the scenario you set out.

That's not how we are treated by the LA. That would be fine but that is not what will happen

In reality it will be people with no concept of home Ed weighing in with there views and expectations..no concept of SEN, no concept of why school has being damaging.

Why are you not focusing on saving at risk children like Sara? Why are social services not being held to account for their failings?

I didn’t have that experience at all when I was home educating.

A really nice guy from the LA popped round once a year. He ticked some boxes, ds did show him work because he wanted to. The LA man took a real interest in it. For a couple of years, a lot of what ds wrote for English and the art and films he made were based around his love of Star Wars. The home ed man was a massive Star Wars geek too, so they would spend ages talking about that.

Then we’d have chat about dogs (we had the same breed), and off he fucked for a year. He wasn’t intrusive or judgemental at all.

I was shunned by a lot of the other home educators I knew for doing that though. I soon learned to keep my mouth shut about allowing that awful “intrusion” into my private life as they saw it.

Not everyone has bad experiences. And to be honest, the ones I knew who did were extremely angry and defensive and got people’s backs up anyway.

There was an inquest into Sara's death, I'm not sure what will happen next but everyone who played a part will have been scrutinised and hopefully mistakes will be learned from.

Most home ed children are probably receiving a good education and being seen regularly by other people, but we do not know how many are not being seen because we don't see them.

It's not your "right" to home ed, it's your responsibility to ensure your child gets an education. You get to choose how to provide that, and if it's in a school, they are inspected regularly to make sure they are fulfilling their duties, including safeguarding. If a child goes to school with a suspicious bruise and the school doesn't report it, they are breaking the law.

If you provide it at home then that needs to be open to the same scrutiny and the child has the same right to be protected. If you are giving them the education the deserve and they are being well looked after then there should be no objection to the LA satisfying themselves that that is the case and moving on.

I think you were lucky with the person you had through. There are going to be people like you had that are great but equally there are some who are awful. Because you don't know if you will get a good one or a bad one allowing them in your home and to see things above what they legally have a right to is risky because if you allow it and they make life difficult it will cause a lot of issues

Yes Sara was failed by social services, nobody is denying that. I followed the trial closely and it was clear that there were multiple failings from before she was even born and throughout her life.

Great that you only know kids who are out and about. I know several who don’t go to groups, either due to SEN or MH making it difficult, being of an age where they feel like groups are too young for them or because they can’t afford the things that interest them, most have a cost especially once they are teenagers who don’t want to meet and play at a local park. There are also many many examples of children not attending groups in the large national facebook groups, just because the ones you know are visible doesn’t make that universal.
I’m not saying that all of these children are at risk but I am responding to your statement that home ed children are visible because they go to groups and appointments when in fact many don’t and we shouldn’t deny that thsi is the case.

I would love to see more positive relationships built between home educators and the LA, it would have to work both ways, LAs have been known to massively overstep and lie to parents which is why there is so much mistrust in the first place. In some areas this has been achieved, I would like to see it happen more widely.

Not a parent alert.....

My concern about home educating is those families who use it as a reason to duck under the radar. That little girl who was murdered by her father and stepmother (Sara, but I can't remember her surname but it was in the last couple of years) was pulled from school to "home educate" around the same time the school raised a safeguarding alert, which then appeared not to be acted on. She appeared to thrive at school, probably because she felt safe there.

ETA, I see others have mentioned Sara. Note to self.....read the full thread!

Yeah, of course evey one will be different. It just used to make me laugh when the parents at the local home ed groups would talk about him like he was the bogey man to be avoided (rural county, it was mainly just him). It was nothing like the nice middle aged man who would sit and chat to ds about Star Wars!

He was a godsend when our shitty neighbours kept calling social services to say were neglecting ds (they didn’t agree with home ed). I called him and he immediately called SS and sorted it all out as he knew us and had seen ds. It made what could have been a very stressful situation a lot easier.

Currently under Law families do have the right to decide to home Ed or send to school.
The rules around home Ed should already include safeguarding
If the processes are done properly by the LA then that is fine.

If the LA can't or won't do what is expected of them for children in school or children home educated the problem is the LA
Bringing in more regulations won't help the LA do their job if they can't manage a job that is less work now.

Bringing in sensible workable solutions is one thing but they have to be logical and workable and they need to protect the most vulnerable not target easy pickings and leave the vulnerable even more vulnerable

All.my experiences of the LA and everything I read about the new ACT doesn't fill me with confidence that this new ACT will.do anything to support vulnerable and at risk children or support SEN children to get an education

Anyone who is properly home edding their child shouldn't object to being registered with the LA and having regular check-ins to make sure that everything is going as it should and the child is safe and happy.

The problem is that at the moment home educators don't have to be registered or have regular check-ins. Home educators who choose not to be registered and/or have check-ins are following the law. Lots of people on this thread are suspicious of people who are doing something perfectly legal. If we want everyone to be registered and inspected the law needs to change.

Also, who makes sure schooled children are "safe and happy" and that "everything is going as it should"?

Everyone that works in the school and OFSTED monitors it.

That doesn't make sure all children are safe and happy.
Lots of children aren't having their needs met in school and the LA will do anything and everything the avoid funding necessary support.

Including pushing families to home education and off their hands

I had an interesting email from my LA at the start of the summer. It was offering holiday activities to vulnerable children, of which any home educated children were automatically included.
To gain access to these activities, families had to be engaging with the local authorities in the way that they stipulated.
I would have thought that it would be the people who were not engaging in this way that they might hope would come, as they obviously would then be more visible.
Carrot, rather than stick would have been better, but it was that stick approach that they opted for. Puzzling.

Ok, so by "monitoring" you just mean that they "find out" . Or do you really think that all schooled children are actually safe and happy?

Do you know why home educated children were put in the "vulnerable" category? It's really not appropriate that they were.

That was the second problem with the correspondence. They could have sent a cheery email saying "Good news! We have secured some spaces on our wonderful holiday clubs, please let us know if interested"
I might have got in touch with my daughter's friends to see who fancied doing something with her. Instead they irritated me with the vulnerable label and the implication that we could only join in once they had checked we were the right sort of home educator.

Organisations rarely think about how they look from the outside and I think that's one of the problems with many LAs when they try to form positive relationships with home educating families.

I dare say that children had to have been identified as having some sort of vulnerability to be eligible and so that allowed them to extend the offer to home educating families regardless of whether they were vulnerable or not. It was probably done in good faith, but they got their communication completely wrong.

No, I’m targeting a social media wave for home ed because they want to “unschool” their kids and despite being wholly unqualified people are deciding they will not be sending their babies to school, with no knowledge of what that child’s personality, strengths or best environment will be.

My post literally says homeschooling is the right environment for some kids. I’ve just seen absolutely no evidence as to why it would be the right environment for these kids other than it’s “so they can spend more time in nature”, a great foundation for a literate future generation.

Are you sure you know what qualifications these people have?

Isn't it quite common for parents to decide that their children are going to go to school "with no knowledge of what that child’s personality, strengths or best environment will be"? Some parents even move house to make sure their baby can go to the right school.

A lot of secondary schools have transient staffing patterns, semi-retired supply teachers covering lessons for subjects they're not qualified in and the workbooks are never marked. When I went to School for a year during RE I didn't have a book to write in and never bothered mentioning it as was all just semi-retired cover staff who couldn't control the class anyway. Another teacher left for a different job taking the entire classes coursework with her and essentially ghosted the School who then tried to retrieve that coursework. With the advent of smartphones now it only takes one child to have some misogynistic, degrading porn on their phone and to show their mates on the playground and the kids will think that's what their parents do and what they're expected to do and it'll alienate them from their parents.

If all the Schools near you are shite, homeschooling might be the better option.

I literally know these people. Personally. I went to school with them, I was in classrooms where they were, I was there when they got their results, I kept in touch with them when they did their college courses, I know what their jobs are. Unless they did a PGCE in secret, I know they have no post 18 education. I know what their results were at GCSE level. I know how they now interact with mutual friends (that they made at school). I know they don’t have the education level to teach their kids enough to get top marks at GCSE, so they’ll have to outsource that if they want to. I know they don’t know if their kids are academic, or creative, or sporty, or anything else because at least one of the kids can’t talk, and the other can’t read or speak in proper sentences yet.

I’m extremely academic, I thrive in an exam and class room situation. And I would have been robbed of so many opportunities if my mum (who also has 3 O levels and no further education) had decided the best thing was to teach me to cook, play in nature and clean instead of going to school. As it happens I got to do all of those things in the many, many days and evenings I was not at school while learning maths, science, history and languages from people who had spent years studying those things and had been taught skills on how to educate young people.

Some people might make fantastic home educators, better than any school could do. Some might know it’s the best option for their child because other options are woefully lacking.

But there is no world where you can make me believe these specific children, and their chronically online, mediocrely educated parents are definitely giving these kids the best chance in life by homeschooling them.

You might be giving your child the absolute best chances by homeschooling them - I’m not judging the community AT ALL. I’m judging the trend that says homeschooling is always best. You absolutely cannot convince me that is the case because school was definitely by far the best place for me (and I was bullied, and I still deeply believe that).

But go ahead, tell me how a parent who can’t interpret a scientific paper and instead parrots what she’s read on social media to prove a point that is explicitly contradicted in the paper she’s referring to is who you would want in charge of your child’s education.

Those parents went to school with you so schools don't turn out educated people either.

If the child can't talk I do t think school will be likely to meet their needs and schools are badly failing children with additional needs

But those parents are not in charge of your child's education. You decide for your child.

They decide for their child.

We all make decisions for our own children that other parents may make different decisions for their children.

If you have genuine safeguarding concerns - utilise the process in place a report those concerns

Ok. Thank you @Fern95 you’ve actually made me think differently about this. Entirely. This makes a lot more sense.
Thank you!

The child’s not even 2, not talking in proper sentences does not indicate SEN.

It’s about opportunity - with proper education these kids might turn out educated or they may not. Without proper education they definitely won’t.

It’s not a safeguarding concern, they’re entitled to make this decision. I am entitled to think I would absolutely not have those people in charge of my children’s education, and therefore I think they’re doing their children a disservice. For what it’s worth, even with my As and A*s, degree and post grad qualification I also don’t think I’m capable of educating a child from 5 to 18, I just think for most children a professional is the best person to deliver an education, accepting that isn’t ALWAYS the best option.

I would never say anything to them, they can educate their children however they feel appropriate. I will judge them privately though ;).