Tackling the problem of extrinsic motivation in childhood learning

In schools children are provided with external motivation for learning what they are supposed to be learning. This extrinsic motivation can take two forms; reward for doing what is expected and punishment for failing to abide by what the teacher requires. In recent years, punishment has fallen out of favour as a means of motivating children. They are no longer beaten for forgetting their games kit or not remembering their Latin verbs; the worst a child can expect these days is a frown or a detention. Rewards though are still going strong, indeed stronger than ever. Schoolchildren receive certificates for getting to school on time, doing their homework and even not disrupting lessons. In addition to these regular rewards, teachers are always on the lookout for anything else for which they can praise a child, even saying 'Good sitting, Mary' to a child who hasn't jumped up out of her seat for five minutes. There are also vouchers, DVDs to watch and end of term treats.

There can be a problem with the constant use of positive reinforcements of this kind. Some home educating parents disapprove of this approach as a matter of principle, feeling that the child should learn for the intrinsic pleasure of learning, rather than because he wishes to be praised or receive a smile or certificate. Some research suggests that they are right to be cautious about using rewards for learning in this way. The problem is that a child can become dependent upon praise and encouragement and if it stops, then so does his motivation to learn. This could obviously be a bad thing in higher education. Imagine a seventeen year-old college student who became disaffected because he was not constantly being told what a good boy he was being by settling down quietly and getting on with his work! This actually happens and some of the dropouts from FE colleges are children find it hard making the transition from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation for academic work.

Quite a bit of work has been done in the USA on this subject. In one experiment, children were given access to drawing materials and left to their own devices. At the end of the session, one group received certificates saying what good artists they were. Another group did not. At follow up sessions of free drawing, when other activities were also on offer, it was found that those who had been rewarded in this way for drawing were less inclined to choose to draw for the fun of it than were the children whose drawing had not been rewarded. It seemed that rewarding the activity had somehow taken the fun out of it. There have been many similar experiments. The general finding is that children soon become almost addicted to little rewards of this sort and that when they are withdrawn, the children will not undertake the activities purely for the sake of it. They have been robbed of their intrinsic motivation to undertake drawing or whatever other activity is involved.

There is no need to abandon this method of encouraging children entirely though. It just needs a little planning and a bit of extra thought. Part of the problem is that many teachers and parents are over lavish with their use of praise and encouragement. Children receive it for the slightest thing; every piece of work is 'great', 'well done', 'very good' and so on. Children become uneasy and anxious if something they do is not praised! The answer lies in the mechanism of intermittent reinforcement. If I might be permitted another anecdote about a piece of American research, then we can see how this works. Some work done with gamblers is interesting. A large group was divided into three. One lot played fruit machines which were rigged to pay out every time, another group had machines which never paid out, while a third had machines that paid out randomly some of the time. Here is what happened. Those playing the machines which never paid out, soon cottoned on and stopped playing. Those on the fruit machines which always paid out carried on playing until the things were secretly disabled and stopped paying out. Soon after this happened, those playing them lost interest and gave up. When the machines which only paid out some of the time were similarly disabled, it made no difference at all. Those playing them carried on. They knew that there had been runs like this before and they stuck at it in the hope that they would win again.

We can use this to plan a strategy for the reinforcement of our children's desire to learn and achieve. if the rewards are constant, then just as with the fruit machines which always pay out, ending them will be very noticeable and can discourage a child from continuing with an activity. If the reinforcements are irregular and used sparingly though, the child will work harder and longer in order to obtain them. As they grow older, the rewards can be gradually faded out until only the occasional smile or word of praise is necessary to motivate. This has proved very effective with teenagers and even college students. In other words, where rewards for academic achievement are concerned, less is definitely more.

The constant drip of rewards and praise becomes simply a background after a while and is thus devalued. It becomes counter-productive. TS Eliot is his later years revealed that he had never forgiven his mother for over praising a poem he wrote when he was a child. Children may become addicted to praise and rewards, but they also recognise when they are handed out routinely and are insincere.

Of course this does not touch upon the ethical considerations of manipulating children and young people in this way. Quite a few home educating parents object on principle to this kind of thing and feel that the child's motivation to learn and study should come from within. For the rest of us though, it is helpful to know the most effective way of delivering the encouragement which will guide a child in the direction of educational success. For us, praise and rewards used sparingly and at increasingly irregular intervals as the child grows older are the key to success in this strategy.

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Teach and forget; a common strategy for parents

I want to look today at what motives parents might have for teaching their children systematically and then forgetting that they have done such a thing; in effect, airbrushing this from their family history. This is by no means uncommon among both home educating parents and also those who send their children to school. Some motives for this are restricted to home educators and so I shall deal with these first.

Quite a few home educating parents seem to feel almost ashamed to be seen to be pushing their children academically and those who do ensure that the children study literacy and mathematics in a structured and traditional way often conceal this from other parents. I want to think about this first and see if we can discover what could be responsible for this extraordinary state of affairs; educators who seem to be embarrassed about educating! There are several reasons why home educating parents might behave in this way. Before we go any further, I want to make it quite clear that I do not want to become bogged down in terminology here. I am talking about parents who teach their children and then keep quiet about it afterwards or try to erase it from their minds. I do not mind whether we call this coercive education and contrast it with autonomous, or whether we talk of imposed teaching and compare it with unschooling or informal education. The fact is, that parents do it.

Many, but not of course all, home educating groups are ambivalent about teaching and imposing discipline upon children. I have heard from parents who say that when they have said 'No' to their child at a group, they are stared at as though they are child abusers. One mother mentioned that her eight year-old son would be studying for GCSEs when he was older and the reaction was very hostile. How could she possibly know that he would do this? Wasn't she being presumptuous? Did she not want to give the boy a choice when he was older? I think that quite a few readers will know what I am talking about here. Under these circumstances, there is a tendency to adapt to the mores of the group and keep quiet about anything that might smack of 'school at home'. There is also, incidentally, a tendency to pretend that one does not permit visits from the local authority, this being another of those things that many parents are expected to give lip service to. People who accept visits are sometimes made to feel as though they are letting the side down. One sees this attitude a lot on Internet lists. The family who I mentioned yesterday, for example, claimed in the newspaper to be unknown to the council and said that if registration became compulsory they would leave the country. In fact, just as with many other autonomous educators, they enjoy a perfectly amicable relationship with their local HE advisor from the council. This is also common; quite a few parents have visits from their local authority and then keep quiet about it for fear of being thought Quislings!

Conforming to the expectations of a group in order not to be rejected is one reason for maintaining these pretences, but there are other motives at work. Saying, 'We're autonomous' is a bit of a catchphrase in some circles. It makes one sound 'with it'. It's a bit like saying 'We're organic'. It is a shorthand code for a lifestyle rather than merely an educational philosophy. There was of course also the enjoyment during the campaign against the Badman review and Schedule 1 of the Children, Schools and Families Bill of pretending to be part of a persecuted minority. For a while, some of these parents could make out that they would be forced to flee the country or go on the run like desperate criminals! This was the only chance some of these families would ever have to feel like members of a despised minority and it would have been foolish to pass it up. Of course one had to be an autonomous educator to be part of this. Structured educators who were registered with their local authority could not make out that they were threatened by the proposed new law and so many parents denied that they had visits and let everybody think that they too felt that the new law would stop them home educating. This particular game encouraged many home educating parents to pose as being autonomous.


Perhaps the strongest motive for teaching one's child and then forgetting that one has done so is this. People tend to sneer a little at pushy parents and those who appear over anxious for their child to succeed. Let's face it; it looks a bit sad to be so desperate for your child to do better than everybody else's! It is much cooler to pretend that your kid does not have to work hard and that you certainly don't have to put the hours in on their education. When GCSEs were are taking place, every single one of our friends would claim that their children were doing no revision and that it was confidently expected that they would do badly at their exams. This was despite the fact that many of these kids had had private tutors for years and the parents were insisting that they stay in and study practically every night. (To say nothing of completing their coursework for them!) When their children achieved a string of As and A*s, it made it look as though the kids were little geniuses who had managed this without trying. The same thing happens when people teach their children things like reading and mathematics. If they then forget about this, then it looks as though their child must be super bright for being able to learn the thing later without any formal instruction. I must admit that I was tempted to do this myself. Had I kept quiet about all the teaching which I did, then I could have made out that my daughter had 'just picked up' literacy, the four basic arithmetical operations and everything else up to and including calculus. This would have had the double pay-off both of making me appear a laid back and right-on parent and also presenting my child as a real brain-box!

I have to say that there is often no conscious deception involved in this process by the parents. Some of our friends seemed genuinely to have forgotten the years of tutoring, the extra-curricular activities and so on. They honestly seemed to believe that their children's GCSE results were entirely their kid's doing. I am sure that the same thing happens with home educators who spend time teaching their children. If I had my time over again, I might well be inclined to erase all the intensive work with flashcards from my memory and allow my daughter the credit for simply picking up reading of her own accord.

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Autonomous education; a case study

Those who are sceptical about the benefits of autonomous education often read with raised eyebrows the accounts of children learning to read spontaneously and acquiring other skills without being taught. Still, it is usually impossible to prove or disprove such claims. Once in a while though, a case crops up where the evidence and records are so extensive that one can see exactly what has been going on and how a child has actually been learning. Usually, when one is able to examine the evidence in this way, a very different picture emerges from that which is first presented. We looked yesterday at an eight year-old boy called Christopher. The suggestion was made that he had been autonomously educated and I want to look at one particular aspect of his education, to see if we can gain some insight into what really happens when children pick up skills like reading and mathematics, supposedly without being taught them by an adult.

Let us consider reading. Some home educating parents, as well as one or two academics like Alan Thomas, believe that it is possible to learn to read simply from the experience of being surrounded by print in society. In other words, a child might acquire this skill without any explicit teaching from anybody. He might just 'pick it up', particularly when he found that it was necessary for some interest or other. This claim, that a child has learned to read without being taught, is not an uncommon one in the world of autonomous education. The child featured in the clip from a BBC programme yesterday apparently learned in this way. At the same time that this programme was broadcast, the family were featured in a local newspaper. Here is the article;

http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/Cambridge/Are-home-educated-children-better-off.htm


This contains the standard legend of the autonomous learning of reading. We read that;

'he didn't want to start learning to read until he was six, and has rejected the system of phonics which is used in many schools.'

'Kit was not forced to read, but instead started to pick it up when he realised it would be useful for him to learn about other things.'

I have asked a large number of people what they understood this to mean and without exception they said that they took it to mean that the child was not taught, but picked up reading at the age of six because he found he needed it for things which interested him. It is hard to see what other construction could be put upon the words used. So far, so good. A fairly typical sort of claim from an autonomously educating family. Sounds a bit fishy, but I suppose we'll just have to take their word for it! After all, we can't really know whether they taught him or not or if he just 'picked it up'.

Actually, this is where things get really intriguing. In this case, we are able to check up on how this child began to read. We can even listen to him learning to read! Let us begin when he is two years and four months old. Listen to this;

http://www.evilsusan.com/susan/Recording3.mp3


This recording was made on January 29th, 2004. We can hear Christopher's mother showing him a series of flashcards, some of which are pictures and others numbers. Five days later, on February 3rd, she is teaching him to read individual letters;

http://www.evilsusan.com/susan/kitalphabet.mp3


The mystery of the child who at the age of six seemingly 'started to pick it up when he realised it would be useful for him to learn about other things.' is now solved. Far from 'picking it up' at the age of six, he was taught to read by an adult at the age of two. In addition to this, he attended a playgroup where the children were taught to read in preparation for school. This is precisely as I suspected. In every single case of early reading like this which I have been able to investigate, the child concerned has been taught. This is exactly the sort of work with flashcards which I undertook with my own daughter. It is what some people call 'hothousing'.

The real mystery here is why some parents wish to teach their children systematically and then claim that their children have learned the skills without assistance. This is a matter of psychology and tomorrow I shall be looking at what prompts people to perpetuate these myths. If the type of thing which I have described above were rare, then it would hardly be worth drawing attention to, but it is not at all rare. Far from being an isolated case, the home educating parent who works hard to teach her child to read and then denies having done any such thing is actually a stock figure in the world of British home education; one encounters them frequently. These ideas can cause great harm to gullible parents who do not understand what is really involved in learning to read. We shall end by reading a very sad account by a mother who has swallowed such stories unhesitatingly and is waiting patiently for her children to teach themselves to read;

http://www.education-otherwise.org/HE/LS5.htm


Some parents like this have a very long wait, because they have been misled into thinking it likely that their children will somehow 'pick up' reading of their own accord.

It may seem to some unfair to focus on one family in this way, but I do not think so. The number of parents not sending their children to school is increasing and newspaper articles and television programmes like this are encouraging such parents to believe that their children can just 'pick up' reading without being taught. This is a dangerous idea and one which needs, for the children's sake, to be challenged.

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Autonomous education in practice

I have been criticised here recently, and not for the first time, for my portrayal of autonomous home education in the two newspaper articles which were published last summer. Among the accusations levelled at me in the past was that I had put forward a grotesque caricature of autonomous education and thus misrepresented the whole thing to the readers of the Times Educational Supplement. I wrote of autonomous education;

' The idea is that the child should be free to follow their own interests at their own pace. They may, for example, look out of the window and see an unusual bird. This may cause them to investigate ornithology and then study biology generally. Of course, this approach just might work with a bright and inquisitive child whose parents are on hand to facilitate their learning. Equally likely is that the child will see the bird, mutter “So what?” and carry on playing Grand Theft Auto IV.'

Before we watch the clip below, which is from a BBC programme about home education, let us look again at what I wrote. Looking out of the window at birds; this leading, perhaps, to a study of biology; the possibility that kids would rather play computer games. I mean, preposterous! Where do I get off trying to foist such a monstrous and distorted idea of autonomous education upon readers? Now watch the clip below, which is about an autonomously educating parent.




The first thing to strike any impartial observer is how spookily accurate my description of autonomous home education proves to be in this particular case. One gets the distinct impression from his body language and general demeanour that young Christopher is indeed muttering 'So what?' and hoping to continue playing Grand Theft Auto IV, or in his case Super Mario. Anybody would think that I had based my article upon this programme! Since it was filmed six months after the publication of the piece in the TES, this is hardly possible. There is of course no mystery about it. The 'Let's look out of the window and study the birds in the garden' line is a pretty popular gag with autonomous educators hoping to get their kids interested in nature. They don't even need to leave the house! The preference of some children for playing computer games as opposed to studying ornithology is also a general theme among many autonomously educated children, as well as those attending school. Let's face it, an awful lot of eight year old boys want to do little more than run round like mad things until they are worn out and then flop down and watch television or play computer games. Why would autonomously educated children be any different? I also have quite a few people, including autonomously educating parents, contacting me privately to discuss this sort of thing.

The real reason that I enrage some parents is not because I am a know-it-all Smart-Alec and irritatingly smug bastard (Although it would be a rash man who discounted this aspect of my personality entirely when seeking an explanation for my spectacular lack of popularity among autonomous educators). The truth is that I often describe how things are rather than how people wish to pretend they are. This can indeed be annoying. I am no ideologue and am hugely interested in how things really work, as opposed to how they are supposed to work. Hazlitt said, 'Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.' This is why I gain such keen enjoyment from the observation of certain types of education; because of the yawning chasm which separates theory from practice.

Incidentally, lest anybody suggest that the clip above is highly artificial because the mother and child might have felt under pressure due to the presence of a camera crew; this was not the case according to everybody involved. The team actually spent a couple of days there and after a while the child more or less took them as part of the background. These people were quite shocked to find that it was possible to keep a child out of school in this way. Their views on this kind of 'education' were well worth hearing and cast light upon how ordinary people see autonomous learning!

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Brave New World and the Epsilon Minus babies

The last time that I posted on the subject of the influence of a baby's environment upon her subsequent development, several people said that they assumed that I had been talking only of home educated children. Frankly, this is a bit weird! Precisely the same processes operate upon all babies, even those who go on to attend school when they are five. I cannot make out whether or not all home educating parents are aware of this though. Some commented that 'We get it', while others denied that it was so and claimed that pre-verbal babies were capable of aiding their parents in reaching common preference decisions about environment and other matters.

Let me try once more and see if I can put into in plain language exactly what I was driving at a few days ago. If a baby is born into a house where the television goes on in the morning and stays on all day without a break, then the baby will take this to be normal life. Having known no other life, this will become her yardstick for normality. Visiting a house which is completely quiet might make her feel uneasy, because it is so different from what she is used to. A child, on the other hand born into a home without a television, radio or computer, might grow up finding silence the norm. She might become distressed if taken on a visit to a house where a loud television is blaring out all the time. That's because she has formed a different idea of what constitutes normality. There is nothing we can do about this; there is no such thing as a neutral home. However, these initial conditions will affect the child. If a child grows up in a home with no books and sees nobody reading for pleasure, then she is hardly likely to ask to read a book. She might not even be aware that such an activity as 'reading a book' even exists. One seldom sees characters on the television reading a book and so the activity would be unknown to her. She may in theory be able to express her wishes and make the choice of being read to by her parents, but she might lack the very words to make the request, to say nothing of the mental concepts which would make asking for the thing possible. Similarly, a child who grows up in a house without a television is unlikely to ask to 'watch television'. Again, she might not even be aware of this as a choice. Both children have been stunted in a sense and their very ability to make a choice restricted. This has happened as a result of choices made by their parents before they were even born. The environment which they first encounter has been chosen for them.

What is important is that these first two or three years of life in an environment devised entirely by others will have an effect upon the way that the child's brain develops. When she is able to express choices, the range of her choices will be dictated by the conditions in which she spent the first few years of her life. Since as we agree, she had no say at all in these conditions, it follows that her parents have, perhaps unwittingly, affected her ability to make a free choice. This happens in all families. I would be very interested to hear of any way of avoiding this, a method for creating a neutral background upon which the child can express her opinions without being predisposed by her early months and years. Every home in Britain either has a television or does not have one. Similarly, every home either contains books or does not. We all have Internet access or do not have it. We have a radio on during the day or we do not. We play music sometimes, often, all the time or never. Each of these choices, choices made by us as adults, will affect our baby's view of the world, help them to decide what is a normal place and what is strange and unfamiliar. In other words, it will tell them how to view the world and give them a mental framework within which to think, work and make decisions. This seems so self-evidently the case, that I have been a little surprised to find that some parents are denying that this is so.

By the time a child is old enough to start making choices about how she wishes her environment to be, the wiring in her brain is already in place, the neural arrangements which might guide her towards the flickering coloured lights of the television or computer screen or in the direction of the black and white pieces of cardboard and paper which we call books. Those first few years are crucial in this and for those years, the child has been conditioned, one might almost say brainwashed in a Pavlovian way, by her parents. This is true in the homes of home educated children, just as it is in the homes of children who will later attend school. Somebody commented here a few days ago claiming that a pre-verbal child could express wishes and thus lead to her and her parents finding a common preference. This is a grotesque notion. A baby in a home without books could not possibly indicate at the age of six or nine months that she wished to have a book; the very concept would be absent from her brain. Similarly a baby of the same age would be quite unable to let her parents know that she wished them to disable their Internet access or sign up to cable television. All these choices are made by the adults without any reference to the child. These adult choices have a profound effect upon the baby and in turn decide the nature of her choices as she grows older; dictate what she is even capable of choosing and asking for.

The truth is that all parents are as ruthless in conditioning their children to make certain choices about their future lives as the most fanatical behavioural psychologist! The conduct of the parents, what they do in front of their babies and small children, how they speak, their leisure activities, the extent of their social lives, the type of sleeping arrangements; all these give an enormously powerful message to the developing child about what constitutes 'normal' behaviours. By the time the kid is old enough to ask questions and make choices, she will already be doing so from a predetermined position; a position predetermined by her parents. I make no comment on whether this is a good or bad thing; that it happens, both with autonomous and more traditional families, is indisputably true.

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Home education and autism

Even across the immeasurable gulf of cyberspace, I can almost hear the sharp intake of breath as readers ask themselves what sort of offensive claptrap I am going to come out with on this topic. After all, am I not renowned across the country, and for all I know the world, for my crass insensitivity about home educated children with special educational needs?

Something which one of the regulars here said yesterday has put me in mind of autism. She mentioned that some years ago people were offering 'cures' for autism, based upon a variety of crank systems. I had quite a few dealings with such things at one time and I was wondering how this might tie in with the home education of children on the autistic spectrum. According to the Ofsted report on home education published this year, over a quarter of the parents to whom they spoke had a child with either a statement or who were at the 'School Action Plus' stage. In addition to this, there were other parents who said that their children were on the autistic spectrum. The overall impression is that quite a number of home educated children have or are supposed by their parents to have, autistic features. This tends to agree with what one sees on the Internet lists and elsewhere; that a sizable proportion of home educated children have special educational needs and of these, quite a few are autistic in varying degrees of severity.

Now it is an interesting fact that the parents of children with autism are more likely to fall prey to conmen and purveyors of fake remedies and snake oil than are the parents of children with some other special needs. Why should this be so? The problem lies in the possibility or claimed possibility of a 'cure'. If your child has Down's Syndrome, then you know where you are. Extra chromosomes, an epicanthic eye fold; the child has Down's and that is that. The same applies to neural tube defects like Spina Bifida or blindness. It has after all been almost two thousand years since anybody was able to make the blind see. You know where you are with these conditions. The case is slightly different for the parent of a child with autism. After all, he looks like every other kid. Maybe there is something that can be done? Perhaps this is like fixing a broken leg, rather than coming to terms with a life long disability? At one time, autism was thought to be caused by purely psychological factors; the so-called 'refrigerator mother', for instance. If it had been caused by a failure to bond, then surely there might be a way to rectify this deficit in later life? Others suggested that the problem lay in the circulation of the Cerebrospinal fluid and various other outlandish explanations, all of which were accessible to treatment.

I have written before of my experience with 'facilitated communication' and autism, but I also witnessed some pretty awful scenes with other treatments for this disorder. I wonder if anybody remembers holding therapy? The idea was that if you could hold an autistic child very tight, squeezing him to you and forcing him to stare you in the eye, then the bonding between mother and child could be repaired. If he refused to look you in the eye then you had to use 'tactile stimulation' to make him. This meant poking and prodding. I was around when Esther Ransome's husband Desmond Wilcox made a documentary about this and for a while it was very popular. Another idea was craniosacral massage. This entailed rubbing the child's head in order to reduce blockages in the circulation of the fluid there. It was also a complete fraud. Then there was the light therapy, the Higashi Method and any number of other 'cures'.

How does this tie in with home education? One of the things that one notices about most of the home educated children with special educational needs whom one hears of or encounters is that they tend to have Specific Learning Difficulties or SLD. This means that their difficulties lie in one or two specific areas, rather than being global. Often, as in the Ofsted report, autism is sufficiently prevalent to be mentioned. There are two possible explanations for this. The first is that children can be pretty dreadful to each other generally and they are especially dreadful to anybody who is a bit strange or out of the ordinary. Under these circumstances, withdrawing a child from school is simply a protective measure to protect her from further distress . There is a second possibility though, which may well be combined with this desire to rescue a child from an unpleasant situation. It is this.

As I said above, while one hears a good deal from home educating parents whose children are on the autistic spectrum, one seldom hears from those whose children are blind or confined to a wheelchair. I have puzzled over this a good deal. I am wondering whether it might be the case that those whose children have a definite, obvious and lifelong handicap come to accept this more readily than those whose children have autism. It occurs to me that parents who decide to educate their AS children at home might subconsciously be seeking some sort of 'cure', or at the very least be hoping at the back of their minds that undertaking this unusual form of education might effect a great change in their child's condition. This could go some way to explaining why so many home educated children with special needs are on the autistic spectrum and so few are physically disabled or suffering from severe learning difficulties. In the latter case, their parents know that little improvement is likely in their child's condition, but the parent of an AS child might be hoping desperately that if they work hard enough with their child, some day something might 'click' and they will see a dramatic improvement in the condition.

I have no idea whether this hypothesis has any merit, but if it has none, then there must be another reason for the number of autistic children one hears of being educated at home. There must also be another reason why so few children with severe learning difficulties seem to be de-registered from school and home educated. I would be interested to hear of anybody's theories on this.

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Autonomous educators embrace the statement of educational intention for the next twelve months!

A couple of days ago, I wrote about the reservations which some autonomously educating parents evidently felt about the idea of providing their local authority with a statement outlining their educational plans for the coming year. A number of parents gave quite convincing reasons why this could not be done. A recent post on one of the lists has reminded me of what a lot of hypocritical poppycock all these objections are!

In order to continue claiming Child Benefit after the age of sixteen, it is necessary to prove that your child is still in full-time education. Parents, even those educating autonomously, suddenly have no hesitation about filling in a form and outlining all the subjects which their children will be studying in the coming year and detailing how many hours will be spent in these studies. This is of course the very thing that they are seemingly unable or unwilling to do for the education department of their local authority! Could it be that the cash incentive of another two years of Child Benefit is enough to overcome their deep-seated, ideological objections to this practice? Apparently so!

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