Insane rise in home schooling?

[whyohwhy246]

Has anyone else noticed a huge increase in home schooling? Someone I follow in IG has just deregistered their child and I just can’t believe how many families are choosing to do this.

Of course it is sometimes the right choice for the child but it seems that more and more children are being allowed to opt out of formal education.

Teenagers need to learn that life is hard and school will throw challenges at them. How they learn to deal with this impacts how they handle things as an adult. What happens when they enter the work place and they can’t just opt out of the difficult things? Where do they learn that resilience?

I have worked in education for 20 years and whilst I agree that some aspects of the system are broken, I don’t think home schooling is the answer to this.

The social aspect alone is impossible to replicate (walking to school together, having your first crush, a detention, school trips I could go on and on…) but I also don’t see how all of these parents can have the skills to teach their children to GCSE. I also find it so insulting to teachers who spend years learning their craft. It’s not just something you can pick up and do effectively.

Has anyone else noticed this?

Yeah well not all of us want to expose our kids to horrendous behaviour.

i’m an ex secondary teacher. We’ve had kids excluded for physical assault with a knife (in school) and he was banned by the police from being in the school site and got a tutor at home.

sexual harassment is rife.

secondary schools right now are not meeting even minimum standards of keeping kids safe and it’s totally obvious why more and more parents are home educating.

couple that with more online schools to meet demand and it’s a much more viable option than it used to be,

plus, the emphasis on attendance is really pissing off a lot of parents. If your kid has medical issues and you’ve not got a supportive school and they are trying to fine you while your kid is going through horrendous health stuff the temptation to go fuck you if you can’t help at least don’t make my life harder and home educate is very high.

a lot of parents are doing it because they feel school is not meeting the needs of their child and frankly they’ve got a point,

This made me laugh 😂

I don’t need to defend myself, my parenting or my child on here with a stranger but yes, overall I am proud of her

This book is not about being home schooled, to be fair.

It's about a child who was abused and perhaps neglected by his mother, using the excuse of home schooling to do so.

Being home schooled isn’t a reflection of adult life either.

My point is that if children are anxious and struggle socially, removing them from situations where they need to flex this muscle may not be the best way to help them overcome or learn to manage this.

Adults generally have access to channels to deal with bullying and abuse. There can be huge obstacles in people being able to break out of these situations, but it being ignored or the individual being told it’s good for character-building and resilience generally isn’t a feature. Thankfully. Ive also seen people dismissed for workplace behaviour that is nothing compared to what kids were doing to others with total impunity in front of the teacher’s eyes.

We home schooled for a while and there is a huge community in my area - lots of socialising opportunities (twice weekly ice skating, Go Ape meet ups, summer picnics); loads of group activities - one local team came second a few years ago in the national robotics championships. Many that I know have gone on to Oxbridge and RG unis - who love self determined, resilient kids who have been actively engaged in styling their own educations. Perfect pre for university, really.

And this was before Kings InterHigh [and similar providers] was a well-established as it is now. Parents with different skills pool them, so maths grads trade their services with Language specialists, so there is often the chance to learn in small group settings.

So long as home schooling isn’t a ‘give them an ipad and tell them to look at BBC Bitesize’ approach it’s very doable with all the tech and online resources and meet us advertised there. Hybrid/WFH parents can oversee their children easily enough so you don’t have to chose between work and schooling.

Many of these parents will be people who were trying to hold down stressful jobs to pay private school fees but can’t do it now as no amount of extra time will cover the VAT. They are now saving on fees, VAT, child care costs etc.

I see the trend growing, frankly, especially in a world where kids are given detentions for forgetting their ruler, or not removing their winter coats before crossing the threshold, and where bullying and violence is growing in schools.

You're looking at it as if it's bog standard bullying. You obviously haven't heard of the extremes. Bullying seems to be getting worse, too. If the child is attempting suicide, then any decent parent will choose to keep their child alive. Dead children can't build 'resilience'. You can learn skills to cope by being exposed to group activities and meeting with other children, without needing to sit at a desk in a formal school. It's not either/or.

I wish I had home schooled my ASD ADHD son. He went to the local comp and it's a really good school but he was traumatised by his experience there.

People asking if as home educators we are capable of delivery a high school education, for me the answer is no. However, I don’t need to. My child would never be sitting exams, isn’t going to be going to university and will probably never have a job. I took him out of school because it was best for him not to be there and makes little difference to his future. So no, i can’t educate a child like a school can but i can do the absolute best for my child as an individual and for me that’s all that matters.

I’m not referring to bullying, posters were saying their children don’t need to be exposed to the social element of school because they can work from home as adults.

I’ve definitely seen an increase online about it. And people taking kids out to travel. I’m not sure if that really reflects more people in reality doing it, I don’t really know anyone personally who is home schooling. I’m surprised that people can afford it to be honest, most families need two working parents these days

There was no bullying at my school because of the way the school handled bullying. We were also taught traditional grammar and maths skills whereas nowadays no grammar is taught in most senior schools, from what I can work out, in the UK, and "core" maths is often taught in place of traditional maths. Parents who care about maths and language skills are teaching at home even if their dc are not homeschooled, they are having to supplement. Difficult behaviours are more widely inappropriately managed meaning that classes are slow and don't cover the material needed. In my day (80s/90s) we were taught balanced history whereas now there is more bias. In my day I vaguely knew there was something called porn whereas today young kids are reading manga with explicit sex content and watchig porn on each other's phones, and accessing "ai girlffriend" which is basically porn via youtube shorts. In my day we read Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen, war poets whereas today they read modern books with inappropriate content and no literary value and libraries contain books and comics with explicit content. In my day most schools didn't live day to day with a serious threat of serious violence whereas today it is more widespread. We were not given detentions ever and yet behaviour standards are our school were high - we were motivated and not punished. School uniform was only a loose requirement - vaguely the right colour shirt, jumpers and skirts/trousers were all fine whereas now it has become a warzone with detentions for minor infractions signicantly increasing anxiety levels in children making all the other problems worse.

I think the question should be - why are we not sorting out our education system?

The recommendations made in the recent curriculum reform reports do not help. Some are taking us at the speed of light in the wrong direction.

I don't agree with the whole 'school teaches social skills'. I spent the majority of my school life wanting to socialise but being told to be quiet every time I opened my mouth. My daughter is home educated and gets to talk to me all day long, and anyone else we encounter through the day. It's not just sitting at home on I pads, there's so many groups and things to do out there.

First of all, where did I say I was teacher?
Second, where did I say it was okay to be bullied? Of course it’s not okay to bullied and it’s horrible for any victim. The point I was making was that most people are exposed, at some point in their life, to other people being unkind. This might be directly through being bullied themselves or witnessing other people being bullied. My point is that children need equipping with the skills to deal with situations like that so that when they are fully grown adults and thrown out into the big bad world, they have the resilience and social skills to manage things that are hard. If they have learnt this at school then they have a better chance of managing as an adult.

Immersion theory is bullshit. It doesn't flex muscles, it shuts you down to endure it. That's not a lesson my kids need to learn.

They can find what works for them and feed that. That's what helps people learn to overcome and manage.

Home schooling suits some families, where going to school has become impossible and parents have thoroughly researched what offers there are locally for online courses, physical groups and any syllabus required for study towards formal qualifications.

I imagine though, that it requires a parent in a teaching or supervisory capacity, to ensure that skills are being learned and progress made. Particularly with online courses perhaps and presumably, someone is needed to transport children to the group activities that are provided.

I can see how, for some, this is the most appropriate form of education. Where is is less appropriate is in situations where the child or young person is with minimal or no supervision, so it’s unclear exactly what they are learning. Anecdotally, I have noticed locally, increasing numbers of clearly school age children and young people in towns and shops, or wandering around, either with parents or on their own. Some years ago, it used to be unusual to see many children of school age around and about during school hours.

I home educated 5 children for over 20 years. They are all adults now.

I have been a 1 to 1 TA for the last year. It's a good school but the system is broken. I haven't seen a thing at the school that has persuaded me that sending my kids to school would have been a better idea.

Today I actually cried in class!

Social media including MN has had a huge influence.

And not always in a positive way.

The last few years virtually every difficulty that a parent is having and talk about on SM, the suggestion is that the DC is ND. With very scant information most of the time.

So it's got to the point where SEN is schools has risen dramatically and on SM parents are advised to push for this or that, push for this assessment, push for an EHCP, take the LA to court, you'll get legal aid..

So SEN is schools and the bill for private schools has risen exponentially and that's hard work for parents which requires evidence and not always successful so the most recent advice given on SM is home school.

I see it all the time on MN and Youtube, posters just saying it as though it's a flippant decision.

Then you have Youtubers for example coming back saying took DC out of school and they're so much happier and thriving. When of course they are, they get up when they want, do some worksheets for an hour in the morning then spend the rest of the day on their tablets or going out with Mummy to costa and home bargains while Mummy films it and says it's educational.

With no regard to what will actually happen when the DC are secondary school aged and need more than a Twinkle worksheet.

It does teach you to be resilient though if you have any oomph in you

When I went to a state secondary after moving house from a village into East London and previously a private prep school ) I had a few girls try to pick on me, saying I was posh etc and generally bullying

Soon our a stop to that but giving the ringleader a good punch . It might not be popular but it worked. And she became one of my best friends for 40 years until her death.

If I'd gone running crying to my dad he would've soon told me to stand up for myself

No reason for a parent to stay home (at least if child is high school aged), the child can self study via online homeschooling methods and groups, and workbooks at home.

How do they learn it? I was bullied through school and the only thing which built my resilience up was when I finally left and got to be around reasonable adults in the form of small sixth form classes of motivated students and interest groups.

Being bullied later on in the work place wasn't something I could suddenly handle because I'd experienced it at school and learned 'resiliance', in fact the trauma was just compounded and took me back to a fearful time in my youth. Any psychologist will tell you that.

Homeschooling covers a variety of perspectives from SEN kids who cannot cope with mainstream school; kids with mental health issues ditto; ideological parenting; deadbeat parenting who’ve relabelled truants as homeschooled to get the LA off their back.

Some are genuinely homeschooled others parents are just opting out.

How many SN schools and Units have gone in your LEA, from when you started? The answer partly lies there. As well as the pressure for SATS and attendance.

I honestly think children in the UK are being exposed to far too many ideologies at school stuff they have no business grappling with at their age. If I weren’t working, I’d probably be doing the same just observing the system. Bullying is rampant, and many children behave shockingly badly. Kids are even bringing knives to school where are the parents?! And this doesn’t even touch on the struggles of ADHD and autistic children. I recently saw a post about someone’s daughter being smeared with poo and targeted by another child. Why should any child have to go through that? If parents can remove their children to protect them from such ordeals, why wouldn’t they? All this ideological exposure, combined with unsafe environments and extreme behavior ✋🏻 ❌

Frightening.

I don't think anyone would deny that school isn't the right place for every child and yes, in some cases it is in the child's best interests that they are home educated. Parents who go down this route, who are acting in their child's best interests are the ones who put a huge amount of effort into ensuring their children learn and progress, whether that means sitting exams or learning skills in other ways.

But let's not pretend that all parents are like that. There are undoubtedly parents who don't care about education or think it's important, who had a shit time when they were at school, or who just are anti-establishment and who don't give their child any education or any learning opportunities at all.