Home education vs school education

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My 6 year old is currently in year 1 and I constantly play with the idea of home schooling!

I’ve got a few friends who currently home school so would have friends to help me out with ideas, I also feel like I would enjoy having my son home and teaching him immensely. However I also have two other small children so maybe I’m thinking of it through rose tinted glasses and it would be too chaotic to teach at home yet?

I appreciate there’s lots of benefits to school and my son although does moan about going I get the impression he enjoys it when he is there and has friends in school.

Just wondering what others opinions are on home schooling vs normal school!

I home educate. Love it.

I think just like school, home education can be done brilliantly, but it can also be done terribly. As a toddler Mum I have encountered home educated children at the park and at groups more suited to pre schoolers, and just felt really sorry for them. It isn’t for me, but I think the world would be a very boring place if we were all like me!

@crazycrofter Many years ago, my role at our LA was to manage our home ed service. It was just part of a much bigger role and I had a senior teacher who visited our home Ed parents to offer advice and check dc were learning. I can absolutely assure you some were doing very little. We had a group of home ed mums who were self declared witches and refused to let dc mix with other dc’s. Their dc never went near the clubs and sports utilised by other dc. They seemed happy enough but I certainly think some home ed people are intense and outliers in society.

The majority or parents were teaching dc well and very open to advice and used some of our resources for them. There are definitely parents who are not doing a good job and dc play all day too.

Your anecdotes are not more valid than other people’s anecdotes. We certainly had some intense and overbearing parents and we also had parents with dc not attending school due to multiple illness - but no specialist could find anything wrong. I’m sure you know about this. Not all parents do a good job.

It’s great you’d a senior teacher liaising with parents. Lots of LAs employ people who’ve never taught or home educated.
It’s true that many families do v little that can be measured against a curriculum or a form. My children didn’t learn to read until secondary age and, had we been known to our LA then, we’d have been judged as wanting. (We are known now and get glowing reports for my youngest from someone whose qualifications are unknown to me; my eldest is happily in mainstream y12, more than enough GCSEs under his belt.)

Exactly - that's what I was getting at, people can offer anecdotal evidence to support both sides. Like anything, there are people doing it well and people who definitely aren't. The oversight is very light (I know because we home educated ds for just over 2 years and had one visit right at the beginning). So people can certainly get away with letting their children down.

I may be wrong, but I wonder whether in recent years, as it's got more mainstream, there have been more 'normal and responsible' parents choosing home educating than there used to be - in addition to all the slightly off-beat types who would have done it in the past. Certainly the two home educating families I know at church have only started doing it within the last year or two and only for one of their children in each case. They are normal, conscientious parents responding to the needs of their kids. Some of the anecdotes you hear from people who've experienced home ed kids re-entering schools say 10-15 years ago will probably relate mainly to the more extreme types of families.

It's just not that helpful to cite examples of kids who struggled after being home educated - if they were brought up in a rather extreme environment, were isolated/ maybe even brainwashed and didn't have a range of opportunities. That's not a fair comparison for someone who intends to home educate in a more balanced way, with lots of socialisation and opportunities.

When my children were at their local state primary, they had the same teacher all day long, supposedly teaching everything, with occasional very half-baked infusions of art or sport from someone supposedly qualified (they weren't). The teachers were not particularly knowledgeable about many of the subjects and often gave out wrong information. One teacher absolutely didn't understand fractions, and many of the teachers were not particularly literate. The one who was teaching music knew nothing about it (even got names of rhythms wrong, and things like that).

The virtue of a local primary school, in my experience, is the chance for children to deal with all the wonderfulness and difficulty of being with their peers, which when it is well done, can be fantastic.

Many teachers are very good at managing groups of kids, and can create some wonderful experiences for the children in their care. In my experience, primary school is not the place to learn rich intellectual content, or to find inspiration towards curiosity and understanding.

I think there is a big difference between HS because it’s what the child needs and doing it because the parent wants it.
The person I know who HS her children 100% did it because of her own issues. She was very much the we do maths with baking, we wanted to do history so we went to the museum crowd of HS. As soon as her children went to college she now has a list of self diagnosed illnesses which are preventing her from working or doing this, previously it was the children.

My friend wasn’t happy with the secondary choice they got so HS her son for 2 years. He did nothing. He looked at BBC bitesize occasionally and played on his computer. She was so offended when she had a home check and basically made out he was doing all the work and why were they even checking. I mean he was fine physically but doing nothing.

It’s extremely difficult for primary teachers to teach music and MFLs for example. They should be secure in the national curriculum though. It’s certain many home ed parents are not that secure in anything and few are all rounders.

As a very pro-school person, I see primary school mainly about social experiences, including friendships and competition/contrast/cooperation, plus some broadening/chances to do things that wouldn’t occur to a parent as an individual, or things that are better done at scale. Learning is something children do themselves in the right circumstances. That in my view can be at school or at home. But I had a truly wonderful 70s primary school experience including the chance to put on full scale plays written by a friend in my year at the school, non-stop clubs being formed among my friends (TNT The Notorious Three; Stone Collecting Club; Litter Club); skipping games and Sevensies that went on for days at a time; full school choir singing ABBA and sea shanties; peripatetic music lessons and orchestra. Irritatingly, we occasionally had lessons in between all this, mostly of incredible dullness. It’s why I am a bit lukewarm on small primary schools.

The flip side to that is that as much as school can be a place of friendship and inclusion it can also be a place of bullying and exclusion.

I will not home school. I would also argue that school is not a place that’s ’mainly about social experiences’ - my son is in reception and is learning to read; I’m hard pushed to think of anything more important!

I think the primary school experience has changed significantly since then. The past few years in particular, with children being given earlier and earlier access to social media.

I think the poster meant that learning to read can be just as easily done at home, whereas there are social experiences at school that are hard to replicate.

I do think the social aspects of school can be overstated though. My ds at grammar school had a 20 minute break and then a 30-35 minute lunch hour - barely any time to socialise. And of course you get into trouble for trying to socialise in class! In his case, he did tend to stay around to play football for a bit after school, but he could have done that at a local park and been just as sociable. Both my kids made friends at school, but they also made friends via youth groups and summer camps, so with the opportunity to do more clubs/activities in the school day, they'd have made friends there too. I suspect they'd have ended up with a similar number of friends overall.

Mixing with different types of children is also slightly overstated, as kids in school tend to choose to mix with those who are 'like them'. And there's segregation via setting/streaming etc which limits the range of children they see regularly.

I'm not against school or home ed. My dd loved primary and secondary school, until about year 10. Ds always hated school and he would have been better being home educated (we did it for 2 years) but it didn't work with our finances/jobs long term.

The social aspect of school is so important. Including the not so good things, if they can be navigated. I wouldn’t unless my child really was not thriving in school and there were no school options to meet needs.

I have 2 kids. One of them has absolutely thrived in mainstream. He needs to be with peers for the social and educational side of things. He enjoys it. My other child has barely been to school for the last 5 years. It causes him extreme anxiety, stress and physical health issues.

it completely depends on the child.

Why do some dc hate a school when others in the same class love it? Yes, I know Sen can play a part but Sen dc when I was young still went to school and joined in.

Even when DDs were at primary school, between 28 and 20 years ago, no child left to be home schooled. I heard parents think our junior school was not great (I agreed) but there’s no way my DDs didn’t want go or anyone that bailed out. Most parents seemed to busy for that too. In a grammar county, many got tutors, but I honestly cannot remember a child leaving for home Ed.

I definitely think the social benefits of school are overstated. When I was a teacher, there were kids in my form class for whom the socialisation would be better described as daily ritual humiliation and torture, no matter how much we tried to protect them from it.

There's a difference between the sort of socialisation that lets them experience the good and the bad and all the bits in between (which home educated kids can still get at home ed and normal extracurricular groups, because kids there don't always get on either), and the sort of socialisation that is just torture and humiliation on a daily basis with no escape.

One thing I have noticed, which I think is a good thing unless people are "children should be seen and not heard" types is that home educated children are often more comfortable speaking to adults. I've volunteered with groups of home educated and non home educated children - school educated children tend to cling to groups and get embarrassed/giggly when an adult talks to them, often refusing to answer. Home educated kids are a bit more gregarious when talking to adults.

@YesSirICanNameChange I’m very disappointed to hear that, as a teacher, you did nothing that worked to help the dc who went through “daily ritual humiliation and torture”. How could you let that happen? You should have been much more involved in behaviour management - surely all schools can avoid the extreme behaviour you cite.

Most Schools are not like that at all.

I find it astounding that any parent (unless they’re a qualified teacher) thinks they could home educate to an outstanding standard

Schools are very far from educating to an outstanding standard. They simply do their best with a large group of children with varying aptitudes and lives.

Yes, and also in reality the key to learning is the attitude and emotional context of the student.

A student who sees their studies as high quality time with a parent is going to learn much better than one who is bored in a classroom, regardless of the quality of the teaching.

Ds1 has done some tutoring since his graduation, and was absolutely shocked to see how disinterested and passive some of his students are. They take 10x as long to learn the same thing as those that are motivated and enjoying it.

It was a culture deeply ingrained in the school. I issued sanctions, contacted home, separated wherever possible and had a "breakout space" in my classroom that pupils could come to, to sit and read, at any time.

I wasn't backed by SLT in the slightest and was told I was overreacting. Sanctions I issued weren't followed up on; parents would refuse to let their children attend detentions etc and nothing was done.

I won't waste your time by asking you to enlighten me as to what more I could have done, because I left that school, and I feel deeply for the students who didn't have that choice, but all I could do was vote with my feet, and decide not to subject my own daughter to that.

I don't think this school was unique in this, though. Most teachers I know of have similar stories - a pupil or three who are the butt of every joke, outcast and mistreated. School is not enjoyable for them, and it takes input from everyone - not just an NQT with good intentions - to fix it.

It’s very naive to think that one teacher can do much at all. All we can manage is the behaviour in our own classes, and sometimes not even then very effectively.

I do my best but I have intricate and fiddly systems and an SLT hell bent on denying we have any problems at all so when you do put a sanction on it’s removed. Besides, the kids don’t care about the sanctions.

So what do you do? You protect as much as you can but ultimately there’s unstructured time and there are phones and other methods of communication and then there’s the ‘non verbal’ stuff - sly looks and smirks and the like. Addressing it is very difficult.

My Dad (sadly now deceased) used to be a School Improvement Officer. One of his areas was supporting home-schooling families. Just like schools, some were amazing and some were crap! The important thing at this point I think, is to really consider

• WHAT you want to teach your son? You don't HAVE to teach him everything he would learn in school, and he obviously can learn other things, but what would those things be, and could you teach all those things?
• HOW would you teach him? There's nothing to say that a home-educated child has to sit and learn everything in the same way as they would in school, but what would this look like?
• WHEN given you have a younger child, what would a day look like, what would you do? Where would each of your children be and would they be getting what they need?

Home education does not have to be school at home. It can be trips out, it can be a totally different sort of day. Often when the children are young, you can do real things. Time for the supermarket shop? If you get them properly involved it's maths (how much things cost and sticking to a budget), English (writing a list, spelling things right) Geography (Where's the shop? How do you get there?) Ethics (Do you eat meat? Why? Why not?) Food knowledge (where's the food come from? How far has it come?)

I would strongly suggest connecting with other HE families locally and seeing what a typical week looks like for them. Also see what options there are socially for HE children - sometimes there are local HE groups that do trips and things together. Also, and I say this very gently, remember a lot of HE parents do so when school hasn't worked. That's great, and I admire them, but they will have different experiences from someone who choses HE from the beginning. Try to find some others who have elected to HE.

I think children deserve their own space, independent of their parents, where they learn to socialise and hold their own with their peers and with trusted adults. Personally, I find the notion of home-schooling quite stifling. My 8yo has his own little 'world' at school, that I get to hear snippets of. I find it quite instructive listening to how he relates to his peers, how they plan things amongst themselves, how they work collaberatively and adapt to and try to read each other in terms of suggesting activities and games. They're only 8, they get it wrong sometimes, they're sometimes cruel or mean to each other, they're often frustrated or impatient when things don't go their own way. But I can see them laying down the foundations of those interpersonal skills which will enable them to make friends, work with colleagues and form successful relationships in the future. I'm not saying it's not possible for home-educated children to learn these skills too - I'm sure many do. And some schools are terrible and some children are fundamentally unsuited to our current "one size fits all" school model. But good schools give those children who are suited to school life a dimension to their lives that they won't get in the comfort of their own homes.

I know a family who homeschooled their 6 children. Not sure how they managed the older ones when they had newborns and toddlers. They did ok. But I think they’d have reached their full potential if they’d been in school.

It might be ok for primary school. However, the high standards and range of subjects they experience at secondary level would be a lot more difficult to teach at home. So there would probably be a disadvantage there unless you supplement with tutors. And once a child is home schooled I think would be difficult to go back.