To disagree with home ed

[Freshton]

Unless in extreme cases (ie SEN, extreme mental health or other complex needs) or parent is qualified teacher, I fundamentally disagree with home ed.

It's insular and doesn't prepare kids for the real world.

I've seen first hand some shocking examples that I can't go into for confidentiality reasons but common thread was parents arrogantly assumed they had same skills as teachers with masters degrees. Reality was kids were really behind, had no proper structure or routine.

It's worrying that so many people see home ed as a viable lifestyle choice. I know school system not perfect at all but isolating children at home or in small home ed group echo chambers isn't healthy.

And that’s the parents fault as much as the school. If we are talking about children with no additional needs, then it’s not just the school failing, it’s the parents. You can’t just hand kids over to school and job done, you have to put in the work at home as well.

Same with home ed. The children I knew who were vastly behind (and yes, not being able to read and write at 8/10 would be anyone’s standard of behind), it was their parents who were failing them.

It is skills based. Private schools have to use it too.

The Iowa Test is an exam given to students in K-12. It covers the following 5 subjects:

1. Language Arts
2. Reading
3. Math
4. Science
5. Social Studies (history, geography, economics, civics)

So what on earth is going on that 60% of children are being failed by both parents and school. Unsurprisingly, this figure is reflected in GCSE results too.

Adults are not adulting anymore?

I think people tend to take rather polarised views on this subject. At one end of the spectrum you've got people who believe that home education is findamentally wrong and that all HE'd children are socially inept and at best semi literate and at the other there are those who think that all schools are either overrun by knife wielding hooligans or run like prisons. Of course those extremes do exist but they're not universal. There are good, bad and indifferent HE'ers just as there are good, bad and indifferent schools.
I'm not sure the argument that you can't effectively home educate if you are not a qualified teacher really holds water though. Educating one or two of your own children when you have complete freedom over when and how you do things is very different to teaching in a school. I think that I could probably, with sufficicient time to prepare, have taught my own children mosr subjects to GCSE and the sciences to A level. I mean it's not exactly intellectually demanding subject matter - I'd imagine that knowing the syllabus is the easy part of teaching. My kids are reasonably bright and would have been engaged and well behaved so I reckon I could have made a decent job of teaching them if I'd had to.
But could I be a teacher in a school, potentially switching from a class of 30 anxious new year 7s to a disengaged bottom set of year 9s all the way through to an A level class in one day, and having to teach children with a wide range of abilities and backgrounds, on a tight time schedule, with all the pastoral care, planning, marking, record keeping etc that goes with it? Not a chance! I think being a school teacher is an incredibly difficult job and I have huge respect for those who do it, but I don't think you necessarily need all those skills to be an effective home educator.
I have met quite a lot of HE'd children over the years, whether professionally, through the volunteering I do or the children of friends. They are not a homogenous group any more than those who attend conventional schools and parents have lots of different motivations for choosing to HE as well as lots of different methods. I don't think they all do it well and do have some concerns about the lack of oversight and the potential for abuse that that opens up. But then schools are highly regulated and some of them are absolutely terrible so even that isn't a simple issue. But some HEers do a great job and I can see some of the appeal. As with many things, if you are well resourced in terms of time, money, your own education, the facilities available to you, your own motivation and that of your children then you can probably provide a very good standard of education outside of school. The less of those things you have, the less likely it is. But there's no one size fits all solution.

I disagree with you completely. We will home ed our daughter because the school system is shockingly bad. My two nieces (one primary, one secondary) are failing badly. One is an anxious mess and struggles to socialise, the other feels like a massive failure because no matter how hard she tries, she is not naturally academic so her confidence is at rock bottom.

My DH will home ed our daughter, he is bright, can critically think, will take her to many social groups and will enrol her in online / courses where he may not feel comfortable teaching.

If the school system was producing genius's that were extremely sociable, I may agree with you. But this is not the case, many school kids are not well socialised, and bullying is rife.

There was a very recent report about the growing lack of any toilet training, play and language input to children starting reception. Worse than it’s ever been - so that compounded with school underfunding would lead I guess to some very poor outcomes for children and young adults.
So yes there is some bad parenting going on pre-school, throughout childhoods, and presumably in home education. Not ALL HE’s obviously before I get attacked!

I think schools should have home ed buildings attached. If parents want to home educate then they go to the building with the other home educate parents and educate. That way they are still involved centrally in their education, the child is safe, they are socialising etc etc.

I don’t know.

What I do know is that I live in a deprived area. I moved here 6 years ago and I was distraught at the schools on offer. My then 6 year old DDs only option here was a failing school.

The staff were good but they were limited in what they could do. They spend most of their time managing bad behaviour.

So we did work at home too, had tutoring. She did so well that she took the 11 + and thankfully got into a grammar school 40 mins away (she was the only one to take it, we aren’t in a grammar area and that’s the only super selective girls grammar within 90mins). The secondary schools here are failing too, we would have moved hell and high water to have got out of here if she had failed.

Some schools are fighting a losing battle. They are in areas, like here, where a lot of parents still see school as the enemy and and pass that to their children. We have parents fighting in the playground on a weekly basis, parents smoking weed in pjamas on the school run. Their children will never do well.

Mine do, because I put the work in at home and because they knew that, my DDs teachers went the extra mile with her at school. I wasn’t slapping them and screaming at them at pick up and I made sure my daughter respected them too.

And it says something about my awful experience of home educating my eldest that even when faced with a school like that, I still didn’t want to home educate my younger two - I couldn’t face the bullshit from other home educating parents again.

Let me get this straight

1. People should not have choice to choice to home ed despite you having the choice to send to school
2. But SEN kids are disruptive and ruining school for my kids - so SEN can be home educated because that's better for non disruptive pupils.
3. Non home education parents feel they know more about home ed than those with actual experience
4. Posters are worried about safeguarding and education if home educated people but they also don't care about the pupils being failed in schools and their well being being damaged by school.

That's usually how the threads go every time someone takes a swipe at home ed - but rest assured the labour government are working at removing rights under the cover of false safeguarding concerns

1. It will be harder to home ed
2. SEN pupils will receive even less support
3. SEN pupils will be one a problem in your schools because a. Home ed will.be harder and b support reduced.

🤣🤣🤣

a. No way would the LA fund this
b. Some children have had such bad experiences in schools that part of the issue is going anywhere near the school building
c. Home ed means you can educate outside the box. This could be at anytime of day any day of the week and in any location. Being stuck in the building would rather limit options

Yeah, it would just basically be a really shit school 😅

The main reason I home educated my eldest was that we had the opportunity to travel the world with his father’s work. If I’d had to take him to a building everyday, there would have been no point to home educating.

I felt like this, then in high school my child experienced a very traumatic incident in school - the school were good and supportive mostly, but DC struggled so badly I would have homeschooled to the best of my ability in a heartbeat. (She wanted to carry on at school but I’m not sure it helped at all.)

I have no problem with home education at all apart from this push back against safeguarding.

On your point 3 - home educators don’t necessarily know more about those that do neglect their children under the guise of home education than the rest of the population. Those saying they do are almost by definition not part of the same HE groups.

On your point 4. - some of us care about ALL children who are being failed both at home and in school. You’re making a big assumption there.

‘False’ safeguarding concerns?

There are education and safeguarding risks with home ed in the UK, different to safeguarding risks in schools.

The number of DC in home ed affected by poor quality education, neglect or worse will be small, but proportionate state measures to try and find and help DC at high risk seem justified . Don’t know if what the government proposes is that, mind you!

i certainly don’t find the extreme testing and exams regimes in schools proportionate!

I don't disagree with home Ed from an educational perspective, some dedicated parents are capable of pulling it off but it's really the social side that I would have a problem with - I can't see how denying your child the ability to build a social circle in their early formative years is going to bode well for their social skills as they grow up.

All those jobs require you to he hard working, flexible, work long hours and interact with others. Most can be very tough at times. You need resilience and the ability to make decisions quickly. Not so easy if you have spent most of your education years being privately tutored and every need catered for. We have many parents who say their children can’t cope in mainstream school and all the rules etc - most are back within a few weeks.

I have a foot in both camps. I flexischooled my eldest for two terms (he was being disruptive at primary, went back to full time school when he had matured a bit) and homeschooled eldest DD for six months due to illness. I would have liked to have homeschooled her throughout secondary, where ADHD made her life hell, but I was a single mum with five kids and I HAD to go to work.

However, I know one adult who was homeschooled and one child who is 9 and being homeschooled. The adult is unable to cope with day to day life despite having been homeschooled for idealogical reasons not SEN, and still prefers to be at home with Mum at the age of 30. The child can neither read nor write (idealogical reasons for homeschooling there too) and is dragged along with Mum to whatever activity she is currently on with, which isn't homeschooling in my book.

Don't see many posts calling for an overhaul of the school system.
A lot of posts complaining about the costs of disability and a lot of posts about problems in schools

People are neglected in all environments.
Home educated children and not more at risk of neglect than schooled children.

The false safeguarding concerns is when they create the image of children being at risk from home ed.
Classic example is the awful case of Sara. This has been blamed on home education

In reality - she had been failed by the safeguarding processes from before she was born. These happened for years and years before she went to school and while in school. Nothing was done despite risks being known.
If the measures already in place aren't properly carried out then the schools and well being bill won't actually help those most at need. It will however, further dilute the resources

But it's easier for the LA to target safe families than to deal with real at risk cases.

I home educate my children. They were in school until Years 3 and 5, and honestly, the schools around us were failing them badly. They were bullied repeatedly, and despite meetings with teachers, very little changed. They would come home saying they’d spent large parts of the day on iPads or working from Twinkl sheets with very little actual teaching. It was heart breaking to watch their confidence disappear.

Taking them out of school was not an easy decision, but it was the right one for our family. Since home educating, they are now working above their expected year levels, they attend home ed groups, see friends regularly, take part in activities, and most importantly, they have their confidence and sense of self-worth back.

I completely understand that not every parent puts the same level of effort into home education, and I do agree there should be monitoring and accountability. As I understand it, the LA will be introducing stricter oversight from next year, which I support. But to dismiss home education as a whole is unfair and quite insulting to the families who pour everything into giving their children the education and support they weren’t receiving in school.

I absolutely loved home educating my daughter, and now she is in the most people centred job you can imagine.

There are endless ways to HE.
The key is to find the right path for the right person.

Customise what you do to your child's individual nature.

If he can't read and write then he likely has SEN

if he had been to school he may have had the same outcome of not being able to read and write (this happens with some people despite being at school) and if he can't cope he may not have even survived going to school. Lots of instances of pupil suicides

He does not have SEN (it's a family member), but a mum who doesn't like schools or formal schooling. She's of the opinion that 'they learn to read when they are ready' and it doesn't matter how many people tell her that they need to be taught. She's entitled to her opinion of course, and her way of doing things, I just think she's 'unschooling' rather than 'homeschooling' - although if she's asked she says it's homeschooling.