To really worry about the future of homeschooled children?

[AgeingMillennial]

Please don’t think this is a goady thread designed to rile the masses about home education. I’m very much not referring to children with SEN whose parents are homeschooling because they’re desperate, or ‘serious’ homeschoolers who do an incredible job and produce very well educated kids by following a dedicated programme. I follow several such families on social media and their energy and commitment is way beyond anything I could do.

However I’m noticing a huge uptick in people ‘deregistering’ their kids to promote a kind of off-grid, traditional lifestyle on social media. Not because the child is struggling or unhappy at school but ‘I want to spend more time with them’, ‘the government want to create tax paying robots’, ‘I don’t want the state to raise my kids with transgender ideology’ etc.

The problem is the ‘homeschooling’ is then very substandard and then consists mostly of nature walks, crafts and visits to National Trust properties. All very wholesome but the sort of things most families do at weekends anyway. They might do a couple of pages of the sort of workbooks you find in WH Smith, but that’s it. Where there are siblings they all do the same basic things, none of it tailored to be specific to their age.

AIBU to worry about the future of these kids and to cynically wonder if it’s a ‘social media stream’ in many cases?

2 hours a day per child. 3 kids

The problem with home schooling is that it puts all power over a child's education in the hands of their parents. I'm not comfortable with that in principle, as a child is a person, not a possession completely at the mercy of their parents wishes. They're a citizen entitled to the state offer for all its citizens, in their own right.
For it to work requires a number of things to be in place.
An objective decision that it's best for that individual child, that draws on opinions beyond those of the parents.
Parents who have the requisit skills to provide a good standard of education.
Close monitoring and assessment by independent bodies to ensure the child is not being short changed.
Clearly these three things are not always in place. So yes, I'm concerned that some children will miss out. While also recognising that in some cases its the best thing for the child.

How do you know they are doing worse since home ed?

Do you see every aspect of their lives?

Also doesn't it depend on what you value or measure?
For example: if their handwriting is slightly worse but their story telling has jumped miles ahead because they are using voice to text app to write their stories.

If they no longer do french but instead do Chinese is this a step back or just focusing on a different area of learning?

If learning has taken a back seat for a few months so that mental health and wellbeing can improve is that a bad thing? learning can be cycled back round to but only if they are well and continue living

It is absolutely impossible for someone to fully know what learning is happening.
My child masked in school and copied from a friend they were sat by. They couldn't learn in that environment and it made them ill but their copied work looked right and so no one cared.

Parents have the power to opt in to formal education.
Are you really wanting parental rights removed.
Should the state decide what food is fed to children. Should someone come to your home and check the meal you are providing and intervene if they personally don't agree with it?

What if you're a vegan home but the LA person believes all children should have meat in their diets. Would you feel this should be parental choice or state choice?

Parents have the power to opt in to formal education.
Are you really wanting parental rights removed.
Should the state decide what food is fed to children. Should someone come to your home and check the meal you are providing and intervene if they personally don't agree with it?

What if you're a vegan home but the LA person believes all children should have meat in their diets. Would you feel this should be parental choice or state choice?

What age are the kids? Is it just little ones? How do you know what their plans are for the kids as they get older? I know families whose kids play mostly till about age 12 then start more serious studying and who are successfully in college and university now after playing and taking nature walks for most of their early years, they started working more when they were ready to.

I think the issue has become confused because the OP was actually referring to what's known as UNSCHOOLING, not really home schooling.

Short version, I agree around concerns expressed about UNSCHOOLING.

I think parents should not be allowed to HE without formal permission

Legally HE should start from five.
What are these kids doing at college or university that you know who couldn't read or write presumably until secondary school age?

Currently the law disagrees with you.

Legally parents can decide to continue home ed or opt into formal school by registering for a school place for CSA

Legally, parents can deregister at any time during CSA

Where schools have concerns over a family deregistering they can and should flag these as part of the deregistering paperwork they legally have to complete. Where flags of concern are raised the LA have a duty to act and follow the policies in place.

Anyone with concerns about a child / young person well being and safety can and should report these regardless of if they child / young person is educated at home or school or is under school age or even a vulnerable adult. So genuine concerns - act. Wanting to mud sling but no actual real life issues - start a Mumsnet thread

I agree with lots of the points you make, but I did want to say that its not actually that easy to do that many post 16 courses with only functional skills maths and english.

My schooled child has only those qualifications and we really struggled to find suitable courses and have to travel much further to acccess them. If he wanted to do plumbing he'd have to do a foundation year, then level 1 before he could do the level 2 course that someone with 4 gcses could do straight off. So two extra years of study in an awkward location.

So my experience has been that if your child is capable of sitting 4 gcse equivilent courses then they should do it.

It opens up options over having nonoror only 2. Obviously if a child isnt capable of 4 them thats irrelevant.

I am more worried about the children in schools tbh.

We have dual citizenships and are thinking of leaving UK because of schools.

Of course I don't want parents rights removed in those silly ways.
What I want is for children's rights to an education to be protected.
The current system allows parents to remove that right from their child with too little oversight to guarantee its being replaced by something of equal or greater value.
As for the vegan analogy, I amvvegan and wouldn't want the local authority to insist my child ate meat and dairy against their will. However if I was insisting they followed a diet agreed by experts to be harmful,b then I'd certainly expect the state to step in to protect them from malnutrition.

And the 1000s of children registered with a School but not getting an education, or with no suitable school place. That spend all day in a unit not getting an education?
Where is the uproar of them not recieving an education?

Why is the government currently trying to remove the current legal framework to the right of education for disabled and SEN children ?
If you really care about the rights of education I suggest you educate yourself on topic of removal of EHCPs and the removal of tribunal and legal rights to education. I suggest you contact your MP and ask them to stand up against these proposals.

Because maybe if children's right to an education was protected and LA had to provide what a SEN/disabled child needs less would have to home educate in the first place. It is concerning that it is already very very difficult to get the LA to provide for SEN / disabled children and the proposals are set to make it impossible

Further to what @SorryNotSorry6was saying. They are meant to be introducing vocational GCSEs.
Which sounds great but sounds like another thing that schools have to shoehorn into their timetabling.
More subjects means more teaching time with smaller budgets.

My two are home educated and always have been, they are both thriving and incredibly sociable. One wants to work with animal conservation and the other with computers/tech/cars. We are a neurodivergent family that work best in our own routines.

I was educated at school and I'm an unsociable "disabled jobless bum" because my neurodivergence was ignored and I spent all my school life suffering. Schools aren't for everyone and people need to realise this.

Parents don't need permission from the government, they don't own us.

I teach students at university who have passed gcse English (usually not a scrape pass either, at least a 5 or 6) and have three a-levels but some of whom cannot write in grammatically correct sentences or join clauses together appropriately. They also have to pass GCSE maths and yet a lot of them aren’t able to do any mental maths beyond single digits and a minority even have a poor grasp of KS2 concepts like decimal places. Obviously I’m not talking about the high flyers but the students who get middling GCSE and A-Level grades. I don’t think all of these kids have been particularly well educated; they have been trained to pass tests. Passing these exams now seems to have little bearing on young people’s functional ability in literacy and numeracy. Home educated kids may not all have pursued a traditional academic pathway but if they are spending their time purposefully and with motivation then they may well go onto do better in life than kids who have attended school. Taking and passing exams is not necessarily a marker of a good education.

Well there's home educating and there's 'home educating' isn't there? A huge, wide, broad field with so many options. I know several children being home educated who seem fine, but it depends so hugely on the parents. I only know one adult who was home educated all through the whole system and, while he is intelligent and well qualified , he struggles to separate from his parents and still lives at home in his thirties. No SEN, just a rather suffocating upbringing that has become his normal.

And you assume that the person from the state is educated enough to make that judgement when in reality it would be someone from the LA with very little training who will base their judgement on their own personal experience and opinions.
Do you think it would be fair to be forced to feed your child meat on the day so of someone who eats meat and can not comprehend that vegetarian or vegan can also be nutritional and balanced diets?

Because local authorities are spending a small fortune in tribunals, sending kids to incredibly expensive private schools whose places have been won at tribunal, and doing echos, rather than spending that money on educating children.

Exactly and it's the same with apprenticeships.

Families go to tribunal because the LA is refusing to provide a suitable education. It is the last resort if families at breaking point. The LA plays all sorts of tactics to delay and avoid providing for as long as possible without a care to the negative impact this has on the child (and the family).

The tribunal is the legal enforcement of what should have already been in place. The LA aren't held accountable for the damage they have done playing their delay and avoid games. So they are free to do this to every other family.

So rather than increase the legal rights to an education and punish the law breaking and failure of the LA they have decided to remove the legal challenge families have.

What do you actually think will happen next???

The LA will continue to to provide an education to the most vulnerable children but even more gleefully as now that can't be forced to

Or

The LA will suddenly provide an education to the most vulnerable even through parents now have no was to legally challenge it

My perspective on this is that home education varies so hugely in quality and outcomes; the problem is the lack of supervision and accountability which distinguishes the excellent from the substandard.

There are home educators who provide an education far exceeding what is available at school and do it with creativity, sensitivity and a sense of the importance of tailoring the service to each child's needs.

Then there are the "home educators" referenced on this thread who are basically doing it because they have chaotic lives or mental health issues and who can't structure their lives well enough to get their children to school on time, so the children's "education" is limited to "helping mum with shopping" or watching YouTube all day. OR the conspiracy theorists who are motivated more by paranoia about the government etc (hence the posts on Facebook groups about how to see off the Local Authority).

Parents in the first category probably don't need intervention but those in the second category should not be allowed to home educate and the problem is at present there is no way to tell the difference.

Home education needs to be subjected to a far higher level of scrutiny and intervention.

While I do accept that a lot of home educators are doing a terrific job of this I think it's an absolute scandal that after you deregister your child you are basically off the hook and it's the child which is being failed.

Ironically, it is actually easier to get in a college course without having done GCSEs but with alternative evidence as a home educated child than it is if your child has attended school but failed their GCSEs