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 know 3 kids homeschooling. Kid 1 has educated parents, dad does a IT type job taking him all over the country. Mum works PT wfh. Kids travel extensively, all cultural trips, forest school, drama, watersports, martial arts, music,science clubs
Child 2, less travel, but music, drama, athletics, equestrian, forest school, Hippy, alternative parents..mum a professional job though.

Child 3, forest school,.....dad nmw retail, mum pt retail. Dad heavily into conspiracy theories, thinks school brainwashes kids into 'lefties woke nonsense'..
Child 3 is the one I feel sorry for.

Good luck for tomorrow!

In my personal experience, (I'm actually very pro my home ed kids having paper qualifications) once you've got a degree, almost no one is bothered that you still can't pass GCSE maths, and don't have it in English, and you don't need them to get onto a degree course once you're 22 and classed as a 'mature' student.

GCSE's are great things to have, because they're shorthand for everyone else, and increasingly for AI selection.
But not everyone can pass an exam in them, in which case is it wise to educate to the point of what someone can't do, rather than what they can?

I took this to the courts. One Dc was deemed incapable of learning and passing exams, so pulled out of academic education by the school, to focus on learning how to tolerate being bullied better, and not presenting in a way that made them a target. ie looking and sounding autistic, and having an autistic gait.
It isn't what I sent them to school for, and schools attempts to teach them to hide their autism, where as woeful and inadequate as their teaching to test.

My argument was should the education budget be used to 'stop progression to focus on what a child is failing at, or used to allow them to progress around their 'failings' with what they succeed at?
The hope is to be able to repair gaps later, but if they can't be, isn't it better for all, than a broken, educationally failed, individual?

If we do the first, we write off every intelligent autistic child with a spiky learning profile, and refuse them a proper education, based on what they aren't good at, at specific ages and stages, not what they are.

We are basically saying spiky learning profiled human beings, who are often born 'specialists', are 'wrong' designs, and reject humans, rather than need differentiated learning if we want them to more like the 'generalists.'

It's a good way of diminishing them and their use in society, alongside others who are just not great at exams, and creating funnels for only one measure of success.
What has happened to nursing is a good example of why it isn't always a good idea, (unless you are only interested in financial profit and loss, not patient care)

Do we want a society of entirely one size fits all education conforming youngsters with those who can't compete having their options lowered and lowered until we write them off for the ease of employer job selection and use?
And say those who cannot do X are forever relegated to low level employment to prop up those who can, regardless of their other talents?

Or are their other models of what education actually is and should be used for that might actually benefit society more?

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1540938500590676/?mibextid=rS40aB7S9Ucbxw6v

A poem by a child damaged by school

I do agree with you that the home school system is abused and children are definitely let down by the system. I have worked in education for years and been saddened by some of the children off-rolled for EHE.

On the flip side I also have two SEN teenage boys, year 9 ADHD/ASC and one year 7 with an EHCP.

This last term has honestly had me on the verge of a mental breakdown due to school. My year 9 cannot navigate social situations and is constantly getting in trouble and had a suspension this term. I do not condone his behaviour at all. Although I also feel I'm setting him up to fail by dropping him into an environment full of teenagers every day that he has no idea how to cope with. I've been tempted to say 'screw this' and pull him from school. But he is also very academically able and in top sets, I am educated to degree level, but his science and Maths work absolutely baffles me. I definitely did not learn half of this at school.

I do feel torn, if I carry on pushing him into school he will end up with more incidents, his mental health will be affected, he gets in with the wrong crowd, will he actually meet his academic potential? Or do I pull him, somehow workout finances and give it my very best shot of giving him an education but keeping his mental health stable as well. I do feel I am really loosing him at present.

This is alongside battling a specialist placement for his younger brother.

I think mainstream school does need to seriously change, the whole setting. Education hasn't kept up with a changing society and the results are really showing it. School works amazingly for some children but many others I feel it can do more harm than good.

If you can get your eldest through GCSEs somehow @SMO212 I would hope things would improve. I have taught several young men like that and they all found 6th form and A-levels a lot better.

Great poem and I understand everything she has said about how she feels and the efect of the lights and crowds etc, but what are the changes she wants? Exactly what changes to the system would make a difference for her? And how would they be managed in practical terms to run alongside what is happening with other kids, does anyone know? What percentage of your average class feels like this?

Heading could equally validly say "A wave of illiterate “school schooled” children" to be honest

Understanding of needs. Not blaming parents or the child who can not cope in that environment would be a start.
Alternative options for children who can't manage mainstream but who aren't seen as severe enough for specialist provision.
There are so many children like her unfortunately.
Would changing glaring lights to natural in glaring lights be unsuitable for those not impacted or would better lighting be something that helps everyone or at least doesn't have a detrimental impact on anyone

Alternative options for children who can't manage mainstream but who aren't seen as severe enough for specialist provision

It was this sort of thing I was wondering about - do you mean a different school or different classes? I was wondering also, do all senior schools in the UK stream classes - ie all subjects streamed into top middle and bottom? Or is it a choice individual schools make? Someone was telling me that their dc's school stream and the top stream is better behaved which is easier for everyone in it (not so much for the bottom stream). Would still need to manage crowds and lights at break and walking in between, but classes would be easier for children who find mainstream schools difficult.

My eldest school refuser ended up home educated from year 6 in primary school onwards. He hated school.

He's now at his second year at UCL and was interviewed by Oxford.

Generally speaking he surpassed his school friends in terms of literacy/ attainment.

There is a family in our village who are ‘unschooling’ which basically means they don’t learn anything. She bleats on and on on social media about how they are learning through life adventures and other such bollocks. That’s not going to help them get a job and support themselves as adults is it!

Get on to Social Services

Well my child has been schooled and school has not met any of their needs. They continued to be failed by LA over and over. So we would have been far better of unschooling as at least they wouldn't have been traumatised by school.

Unschooling isn’t the same as homeschooling. They literally learn nothing. They follow no curriculum or lessons. It’s all learning through discovery and life lessons. I understand that a school setting isn’t right for every child but if you’re going to homeschool then make sure you’re able to teach your kids something that will give them a future.

It's not true that they learn nothing. I have a friend who unschools and her children have learned loads! They read better than most schooled children their ages. Do loads of clubs and classes.

Unschooling doesn't mean learn nothing it means child led.
So for example. Cooking: reading, following instructions on the packed, measuring ingredients, timings prep includes so much education in a natural way.
Reading subtitles or lyrics.
Researching and learning history around a period of interest

Often when allowed to follow their own interests and timescale children can thrive

Since we have given up on LA ever providing an education we have seen so much positive progress in learning. I wish I had never sent to school.

The unschoolers I knew, worried me quite a bit for the same reasons. Mum seemed tbh a bit vague, and living a level of alternative that I couldn't really relate to. The kids didn't really seem to do much in the way of learning beyond observation of what was around them, but they where clearly enjoying life at least. But compared to what we where doing it seemed very woolly and unlikely to provide well for their futures.
We'd been back footed into home education and where seeking to repair a lot of damage and try and end up with exams.
It felt like the unschoolers mum was taking a hell of risk with her casual 'Oh they'll do what they want, when they want it, if they want it' rhetoric, but what did I know.

Then the DC's started to hit their teens and what felt like out of the blue, one by one, started investigating and organizing themselves to study exam syllabuses and quizzing my DC and sometimes me, about what we where up to.
They'd developed a level of independent learning that they where able to apply to most things despite almost no previous formal study, and surprised me how easily they adapted themselves to it all.

Mum only got involved in booking and paying for exams, and a bit of help with transport for some. The DC's did most of it.
They did well, and then did the same for A levels while slouching about the rest of the time happily.
Then they applied for and took themselves off to uni with few issues, where they stood out as different, but socially adept and independent from day 1.
Mum appeared to be even more vague about what they where doing, but clearly she could afford to be.
They are all adult now, and all have careers, two of them high flyers in science. They think their radical unschooling childhood was in general a very positive thing.

It taught me not to be too opinionated or quick to judge what others are doing based on my narrower ideas about how to achieve the same end results, which is where they've all ended up, as have their home educated and school educated partners.

Catlin Moran, the journalist, seems to have an upbringing a bit like that.

It's given her plenty to write about, anyway!

@elleherd that is really interesting!

Another thing I noticed about homeschooling was that during covid lockdown the children of parents who did a lot of school work with their children at home jumped ahead incredibly, ie learned a lot more and more quickly than at school where interruptions and distractions take up a lot of time. And that this had a longstanding effect, once ahead they stayed ahead. That was quite interesting too.

@Elleherd I didn't follow 'unschooling' as a methodology but my son who school refused for the entire of secondary Ed ended up very much like this.

He did very little for the first couple of years because of his level of trauma and then he wanted to engage so i helped him pick up the curriculum for 6 GCSEs which he did adequately well enough in to get in to the local 6th form college.

His teachers at A Level were so impressed with his ability to be self motivated and to self study, his skills in those areas were much better than the kids who'd been taught GCSEs.

@lifeturnsonadime Nowadays's that doesn't particularly surprise me, as I've been around home ed long enough now.🙂It might have in the past when I knew less.
Back then, we came out suddenly after growing repeated incidents culminated in plans being made for what to do when another attempt on his life was committed, and I woke up to the part I was playing in a relentless journey towards him potentially not surviving to adulthood. (I still can't believe I didn't recognize I was part of it sooner)

Ds came out badly traumatized and poorly educated. But very poorly educated myself, the only understanding of education I had was the school model, and he was so far behind in it.

CAHMs accepted him on list, as a bullied autistic child, now breaking.
Saw him once and suggested trying to get into other schools, knowing I'd done that and nowhere had a place, and discharged him, after we'd waited 9 months for help that never came.

We started trying to patch something together, and at first we tried to do 'lessons' but outdoors, because he couldn't cope with being in a room trying to study anymore. It was all associated with violence, public humiliation and failure.

Being around nature and animals was clearly what he needed, so we did that, and explored, and talked... a lot. Then started using displays about animals and nature as base educational materials and then researching around them, before doing the same with science museums etc, and making tentative inroads to get him around other children. (shattered trust and he feared further sexulised assault, having absorbed schools 'boys will be boys' mantra, over what had been done to him)

While we did that I was figuring out how to adapt exam curriculum's for him.
I was very wary of other home ed parents views that none of it was necessary, because I couldn't imagine different, and the alternatives felt like gambling tbh. And, as I'd already badly failed my child by trying to encourage them to cope with such an awful situation, I was too scared of making another mistake.

But as I started to know what I was doing I relaxed and realized liquid forces and motion (physics ) could be learned surfing rather than in a classroom setting up experiments, etc. We do things the way we do in school for economies of scale, not because they're the best method of learning.

I also started seeing that most of the other families, including the more radical, also 'kind of' knew what they where doing, (and not) and where trusting the process, just as we where trusting our process, and it was just very different routes and rhetoric around them.

Time around many different home ed'ers has taught me, the majority of children will engage with formal learning, when they are ready to engage, and or, the right way and time for them to succeed at it, has occurred in their lives.

Encouraging good MH, a love of life, and learning, activeness, and allowing space for them to absorb and grow, yields good results.

I've seen a tiny percentage of educational failure by their 20's, in large numbers of home ed, against a much bigger percentage in a similar number of school ed.

Those who make an active choice to develop independent learning always do well in education, because they learn an essential skill, that school attempts to teach to them discretely as part of striving to be in the 'successful group' rather than what home edders (of all types) have the time to do, which is facilitate a love of learning for the sake of learning, regardless of IQ, exams etc.

Two of my home ed Dc's are now (HL) teachers, and a third working in education. All have worked in a variety of places before getting snapped up by better ones.
Based on the percentage of 'failing' children they've seen in average schools, and the way many schools are behaving to try and quash issues with a few, at the expense of the majority, they are more concerned with the huge future potential 'wave' of damaged young adults with ongoing MH issues, leaving standard schools poorly equipped for the life school's supposed to prepare them for, and unable to cope with work.

I used to do Supply teaching and a bit of private tuition as well. I had a call from a parent whose child refused to go to school. I still struggle to comprehend a world where that could be an option. Ok, so private lessons.

The person who had passed my name on had two absolutely delightful home-school children who wanted to learn but were Irish traveller, and the utterly zoo-like joke-shop Academy down the road had ganged-up on them (as if they were in any position to look down on other people) to the extent that they hated going to school. I got on fine with them and they, crucially, wanted to learn things. The boy was brilliant at Maths and useless at English, the slightly older girl exactly the opposite. The parents brought me in because they wanted their children to have at least an O Level in the basics and hadn't been to school much themselves. Being useless at a subject is not a problem for a teacher. That's what we're there to fix.

We made an appointment to go to do a trial lesson with the child who had been referred to me and two hours beforehand I had a phone call. Don't come. The child who "had a melt down" about going to school "had a melt-down" about having home tuition. And according to Mummy, there was nothing that could be done about that. Never, ever heard anything of them again.

Good luck getting a job.

They had a lucky escape if you struggle to comprehend why some DC are unable to attend school.