why doesn't the gov pay the parents to home educate if they want to?

[tinselwreath]

I just have a question as I'm curious what people think here since there is the obstacle of closing primary schools to keep virus numbers down.

Why doesn't the government offer the pupil funding to the parent instead? This could be completely voluntary but considering there is about £3750 attached to each primary school pupil, they could give this directly to parents at around £300+ per month for each child and not include this in universal credit calculation to make it more lucrative. Plenty of parents would probably choose not to send their children in and it would leave more space for rotas/social distancing for the parents who cannot take the pupil funding option instead. This shouldn't cost anymore money because it is simply taking the money that the school would receive and giving it to the parent.

Now I’ve literally seen it all!!

So my sil who just got her GCSE’s and has barely knowledge about most of the stuff from school .... is going to teach her son. Is this the future of the country we want ?

Also , no chance I’m giving up my job for £300 a month. If I wanted to homeschool my son I’d do it like many parents have done it til now. No need of money ... but he’s better in school than at home

@tinselwreath

It's a pandemic, sacrifices have to be made for the greater good until things go back to normal. Otherwise we're going to have kids in and out all over the country with inconsistent education.

It’s really hard to reason with people when they are in this emotional state.

What exactly are you worried here that calls you to think that reforming / shutting down the entire education system that has evolved over 100+ years is a good idea?

I never said force people to home educate, I said give them the option. This makes sense when you consider you can't socially distance in schools and there are plenty of parents who have been made redundant in 2020 who deserve to be paid for doing the vast majority of work.

I think they do in some parts of California. Not give parents the cash obviously, but for kids in the area they can use one particular online school as an alternative. I think it's a great idea as it offers an alternative structured education, particularly for those kids who don't thrive in school.

But your idea just isn't feasible - the money cannot be taken from school budgets as they are set in advance and are accounted for.

So even if 10% of parents wanted to home educate there isn't the money to pay them

And that's before we discuss quality of education, abuse of the system and safeguarding

I really don’t think you’ve thought this through.

Here, parent of vulnerable child, here’s £300+ a month extra to keep your kid home from school, where no one can see what’s going on and interfere...

Brilliant idea. Jeepers.

WE ARE NOT TEACHERS

How would all these parents plan the curriculum etc? I'm sure it's possible but most would have no clue. Esp if child is expected to slot back into school life eventually. Teachers won't be sending any info if they have no money in school for wages as it's all now going to the parents. Also there'd be no funding for vulnerable and keyworkers kids. Makes no sense. We defo shouldn't be paid to educate our own children

I think it would be wise to allow parents to keep their kids registered to a school but not send them in this year if they feel it is safer for their family. Basically acknowledge that for this school year having absences is partly beneficial to the country/school and is much more understandable.

However the school should still be paid because we're going to need those teachers once covid is less of an issue.

I'm all for thinking outside the box but this is completely batshit!

I am a SAHM, I can fairly easily teach the essential stuff at my kids level at the moment (lower primary) and I have thought about homeschooling in the past even before covid. I am theoretically exactly the kind of person you think this would appeal to. But it doesn’t because actually my kids absolutely thrive at school, they need peers, they need to do things apart from me and as they get older they’ll need better teachers than me. Buggering up school budgets, cutting place numbers, exacerbating staff shortages etc for a few hundred a month now would be ridiculously short sighted.

Ultimately as a parent it’s my job to ensure my children receive an education. I can choose to send them to a school if I want, but if they aren’t at school it is my job and responsibility to educate them, it’s not government’s place to pay me to do it anymore than it’s their place to pay me to wash their clothes, feed them dinner and generally look after them. What next, I get paid a nurses wage for giving them calpol if they’re sick?!

Safeguarding could be solved via video calls with health visitors. Which would actually be safer than a nation of latch key kids.

Government could pay the set budget for what was agreed and take the hit for the additional amount. Plan for the worst, hope for the best. Chances are this is going to be the foreseeable until 2025. The other alternative is working mums will be dropped from employment en masse as their kids are continuously sent home. There will be no point in hiring a woman anymore. Hello Gilead. Schools need to have fewer pupils to avoid this.

@Seafog

And if the parents can't teach for fuck, but just want the money?

My thought exactly.

What would you need the £300 a month for unless you expect teaching your own kids to be a paid job. With three kids that’s £900 a month!

I can see a certain type of person withdrawing their kids purely for the financial advantage that would bring and then providing very little in the way of education. Hardly in the children’s best interests.

Op

Your level of critical thinking and ability to take feedback says to me that you’d be wholly unsuitable for home educating a child.

Would you bring in interviews of suitability or just let any parent do it?

I’m thinking you might fail an interview

Safeguarding could be solved via video calls with health visitors. Which would actually be safer than a nation of latch key kids.

Do you understand anything about safeguarding?

Parents may not be the best teachers but when schools are screwed via a pandemic that makes them be the teacher while also WFH this is actually going to be a worse education.

Ridiculous idea. Schools would still need to employ teachers and other staff and losing a few pupils wouldn't result in enough savings to enable them to function without the funding that they would lose. The funding might be calculated according to the number of pupils but the costs aren't incurred on a per pupil basis.

Apart from this, why on earth would taxpayers want to fund parents to educate their own children? There wouldn't be any quality assurance or even checks that the money was being used for educational purposes.

Terrible idea from my perspective!

There would be few parents likely to want to take on the responsibility of Home education.
Once you are deregistered you have no input from the LA at all, and would need extra time to prepare resources and plan/mark the child's work.

@tinselwreath

It's a pandemic, sacrifices have to be made for the greater good until things go back to normal. Otherwise we're going to have kids in and out all over the country with inconsistent education.

The sacrifices, in this case, are going to be (a) the education of children, because the people who will pull their kids out of school for £3750 are going to include many many parents who do not have the skills or desire to properly home educate (b) the financial viability of schools, which have to pay staff and maintain sites based on assumptions around income and (c) the taxpayer who will be funding the whole mess.

I do think home educating can be a great choice for a motivated and well-suited family, but not all of us are set up for this and financial incentives would get such wrong outcomes.

I don't think parents should receive the money directly tbh. That money's there for the child's education and without a doubt it would be abused by some. Access to online resources, certain online schools would be fine paid for directly.

🤣

It’s ridiculous, undesirable and unworkable, as has been thoroughly explained to you already upthread. It doesn’t fulfil a policy outcome the government wants, it has huge knock on negative impacts on children/employment/safeguarding/schools as well as costing mounds extra to government. Therefore, it’s not a good policy.

🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️

But anyway, before covid, there was a shift towards getting kids out of home ed and back into school, so I can't see this ever being a government initiative. It's only that covid got in the way of all that.