Why won't the local authority take my word for the education which I am providing?

A regular complaint from some home educating parents is that their local authority wishes to visit them and discuss the education which they are providing for their child. Failing that, an increasing number are now asking to see samples of the child's work. Why won't they just accept the word of the parents for what is going on? Why do they wish to check for themselves?

The answers to these questions are pretty obvious to everybody except home educators. First, parents seldom tell, or even know, the unvarnished truth about their own kids. One rarely meets a parent who says that her child is spiteful and sly or admits that her son is a bully. Similarly, most parents try to put a gloss on their child's academic achievements. They usually want to pretend that their children are doing better than is actually the case. This is not limited of course to home educating parents; it is a pretty general thing. Parents are really very unreliable witnesses when it comes to telling other people what their children are like. How could it be otherwise? We are not, nor should we be, objective about our own children. For this reason, local authority officers tend to take the educational philosophies, diaries and photographs which home educating parents send them with a large pinch of salt. They would rather see work which the child himself has done or ideally speak to him in person.

They are right to be cautious about accepting at face value what they are told by parents. Some of the most vociferous advocates of informal education, parents who resolutely refuse to do anything at all in the way of formal, school-type work, often make the most ludicrous claims to their local authority about what they are doing. This is done to keep the local authority from asking too many questions. This is especially common when the child has a special need and the parents are anxious to avoid the involvement of other agencies. Local authorities sometimes get uneasy that SEN children's needs are not being met by education at home. They are perfectly aware that many parents spin them tall stories about the sort of education which their child is receiving and the wonderful achievements of the kid now he is out of school. In short, some home educators lie their heards off about what their children are achieving.


On several of the home education lists is an aggressive woman from the village of Eardisley in Herefordshire who is a very strong advocate of not allowing the local authority to visit. She regularly advises other parents to be firm in refusing visits and tells them that they do not need to show anybody the child's work or provide anything but the minimum of information about the education being provided. Her own son's education consists, by his mother's own account, largely of watching television, spending time on the internet and talking to his mother. So far, so good; a fairly typical case. However, what she tells the local authority is so completely at odds with this that one cannot help but wonder if it is the same person! Last year when her son was twelve, she claimed that he would be taking eight GCSEs within a year; even repeating this ridiculous story to the local paper. Eight GCSEs at the age of twelve! Even a mad, fanatically structured home educator like me would think twice about this!

This is admittedly an extreme case, but none the less not uncommon in that a mother who provides only the sketchiest education is claiming to be teaching her child with a view to taking formal examinations. Local authorities come across this a lot and one way that they can find out is really happening is to chat to the child and see what he says he is studying. It is this desire to know what is happening on the educational front which lies at the heart of many requests for visits. Speaking for myself, I seldom take anything a parent tells me about her kid at face value . A lot of mothers think that their children are unrecognised geniuses and few parents spot character traits like cruelty or dishonesty in their own kids. Strangers can often form a better and more accurate opinion about a child's capabilities and potential than can the child's parents.