Home educators 'just don't get it'

The above is a quotation from my daughter. As I have perhaps mentioned, she is very involved with the Ed Balls leadership campaign, spending a lot of time at the headquarters in Victoria and also travelling to various events. At least it gives her a chance to meet a bunch of Z list politicos like Oona King and so on. I said recently that nobody with whom she knocks about in the Labour Party knew she was home educated, but that changed the other night. Somebody in the office was talking about the letter of support which a home educated child had...

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On Liberty

Time to celebrate the life and opinions of one of the greatest home educated people ever, a man whose name became a byword for freedom and the right to do pretty much as you please. Step forward John Stuart Mill, perhaps the greatest intellect of the Victorian Age. His father was a proponent of what we would now call Hothousing, where a child's intellectual development is deliberately stimulated and accelerated with the intention or at least hope, of producing a genius. James Mill accordingly taught his son at home from infancy. By three, the child...

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Non-standard UK qualifications

Last week I was accused of being fixated on GCSEs and A levels and not acknowledging that there were other, equally useful qualifications to be had by the home educated child. This is a very fair point and so I thought it might be worth looking a little at the alternatives to the standard qualifications in this country and seeing if any of them might be preferable for those being educated at home.The first point to consider is this. The higher education system and also most employers are geared to the GCSE and A level. This may be regrettable,...

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De-registering children to avoid trouble

Most parents who de-register their children from school do so in order to provide an education for them at home. It might be a strange or insufficient education, but the intention is definitely to give the children some sort of education. However, for at least the last ten years or so, it has been noticed that some are not choosing this option for the positive reason of home education, but rather to avoid ending up in the courts. When Ofsted surveyed fifteen local authorities last year, they spoke to a hundred and twenty home educating parents...

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This blog

Until a week ago, I was convinced that the only thing which attracted so many readers to this blog was the luminous quality of the prose which I turn out with such effortless insouciance. Sadly, this would seem not to be the case. Indeed, when I mentioned that I had been keeping this blog for over a year, several regular contributors to the comments hastened to set me straight about their motives for coming on here every day. Apparently for some, reading this blog is a distasteful duty which must be undertaken, whether or not one feels like it....

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The topsy-turvy world of the home educators

It isn't hard to see sometimes why local authority officers get a bit ratty with certain home educating parents. Often, the reason is that these parents are working to a set of standards and beliefs which are pretty well diametrically opposed to what everybody else in the UK thinks. An exaggeration? Not really. let's look at a few specific examples.Almost everybody in Britain regards education as a way to get on in the world. Formal qualifications are accepted as being a useful tool to demonstrate knowledge and ability and to help in getting a...

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Giving children choices

Now either I write in a very incoherent and confusing fashion or some of the people reading this blog are deliberately obtuse. We must hope that it is not a combination of both these things, otherwise I might as well give up and stop writing these pieces altogether! I have for the last couple of days been trying to make what seems to me a very simple point; that the more formal qualifications a teenager possesses, the better, generally speaking. This is because having things like high grade GCSEs and/or A levels mean that good jobs, vocational...

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The weatherman and the rules

When I was little, my family used to go and stay with my grandmother at the seaside. She had one of those weather-houses, the kind made in the shape of an alpine chalet, where a little woman would come out if the weather was dry and a little man would come out if it was likely to wet. I remember once when we had a day out planned and the little man came out. I pushed him back in hope of discouraging the rain. My infant mind had of course confused cause and effect; I thought that the man was actually causing the bad weather, rather than merely foretelling...

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Todays GCSE results

The publication of GCSE results today seems to me to be a moment for reflecting upon what these examinations mean to home educating families. One often sees things written by parents who are educating their own children that minimise the importance of GCSEs and suggest that they are hardly worth having, so devalued have they become by so-called 'grade inflation'. This strikes me as a neat excuse for indolence; why should we bother with them, they aren't really worth anything anyway? The truth is that GCSEs are becoming ever more important. Indeed,...

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Home education as a Pavlovian reaction

There has in recent years been a great deal of research on free will. By this I mean scientific, rather than philosophical enquiry. The general consensus is that the study of the brain leaves little room for the exercise of free will. It looks as though we act first and then a split second later rationalise our actions after the event. I have been thinking about this process in connection with the decision by parents not to send their children to school. Of course all home educating parents, including me, like to guy up our choice as being based...

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Statistics

It is one of the enduring mysteries of home education in this country; how many children are actually being educated at home? The Ofsted survey Local authorities and home education, which was published in June, sheds new light upon this.One big problem when trying to calculate the numbers of home educated children is that everybody exaggerates or underestimate the numbers depending upon who they are talking to and what they wish to prove. Home educating parents do this and so do local authorities and the Department for Education. Graham Badman's...

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Autism and home education

Even across the immeasurable gulf of cyberspace, I fancy I can hear the sharp intake of breath and see the narrowing of eyes and shaking of heads which the very title of this post is liable to be causing. What sort of insensitive claptrap is the man planning to come out with now? Does he have an autistic child? What does he know about it then?All fair questions indeed. I am not proposing to write about the actual home education of autistic children, about which I know nothing. Instead, I am going to talk a little about autistic children and adults...

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Inquiry-based learning

Home educators are not in general great ideologues. They tend to get on with their lives and their children's education without worrying overmuch about which pedagogical technique they might theoretically be using. There is however one exception and that is of course autonomous education. This is an ideology or philosophy of education which many home educating parents, particularly in this country, have taken to with enthusiasm.Autonomous education is really no more than a rather extreme version of inquiry-based learning, which is itself descended...

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Shameless boasting

I thought that readers would like to keep up with my daughter's affairs and so might find this of interest:http://www.guardian-series.co.uk/news/8342825.LOUGHTON__A_level_student_celebrates_another_year_of_full_mar...

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An important anniversary

I must crave my readers' indulgence as I reflect that this blog has now been running for just over a year. I have been prompted to muse about this by something which I was reading on the HE-UK list recently. A new forum for home educators has been started, called Other(wise) Inclined and the woman who started it mentioned the fact on the HE-UK list. Mike Fortune-Wood, owner of the list, rather sniffily expressed the view that nobody really needed another HE forum and he couldn't see why anybody would want to start one. Others agreed. This struck...

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Natural parenting

The word natural has been making rather too many appearances in the comments here for my liking; 'natural parent-child relationship', for instance. We have also seen 'artificial' used in a pejorative sense when talking about my own parenting techniques, 'The artificial excesses you describe'.I don't know what it is about this concept of 'natural' being good and 'artificial' being bad; especially when it comes to parenting and training children. It is part of a particular mindset which I can't abide. 'Natural' seems to have become generally synonymous...

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Parenting styles of home educators

I posted yesterday about the use of operant conditioning with children, which apparently left many readers with the impression that I am a cold and authoritarian parent. Some of the comments were very revealing; 'nauseous', abhorrent', 'distasteful' and so on. I am not altogether surprised by this, because the parenting style of many home educating parents who comment here is very different from my own. Let's have a look at parenting styles and see what the difference is between how I operate and how many other home educating parents seem to do...

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Moderation

I know that some people are getting irritated at the moderation here, but I really can't think of a way to stop this just at the moment. Peter Willliams from Hampshire is still bombarding this blog with dozens of messages every day, under the mistaken impression that I work for Hampshire County Council and can help with his problems. Here is a sample of the sort of thing which he is sending:'We going to send 2 letters of complaint to Hampshire Council 2day Webb see it has an English lesson LOL''new complaint about HCC send today Webb lol tell teacher...

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