The real threat to home education

Over the last year or two, quite a few people seem to have fallen prey to the delusion that some kind of war is being waged against home educators in this country. We hear of a campaign of vilification, attempts to introduce legislation which would limit the freedoms of home educating parents and all sorts of other alarming things. The odd thing is that although I know quite a few teachers, social workers and local authority officers, I have never heard any of them say that they wish to put an end to the practice of home education. Nor have I heard this wish being expressed by anybody else. True, many people have reservations about home education. These often centre around tired old chestnuts like socialisation or a supposed inability to study science without a state-of-the art laboratory. Never once have I heard anyone say that they think that somebody should put a stop to home education.

This is quite curious, in view of the feeling of being beleaguered and menaced by hostile forces ranged against them which quite a few home educators seem to have. What can explain the discrepancy between the way things actually are and the way that some parents think that they are? In order to understand this, we must look to the past.

Home education has never been illegal in this country. Indeed, until the nineteenth century, it was probably the most common form of education in use. Even with the advent of universal schooling in 1870, under the so-called Forster's Act, a loophole was left which meant that those who did not wish to send their children to school would not be compelled to do so. Introducing the Elementary Education Act to the Commons on February 17th 1870, W.E. Forster said:

'We give power to the school boards to frame bye-laws for compulsory
attendance of all children within their district from five to twelve. They
must see that no parent is under a penalty for not sending his child to
school if he can show reasonable excuse; reasonable excuse being
education elsewhere, or sickness...'

Just like the later 'at school or otherwise' which was included in the 1944 and later the 1996 Education Acts, so too with the 1870 Act. Instead of 'education otherwise' this had the get-out clause of 'education elsewhere'.

A mythology has built up around the home education movement in this country. Briefly stated, the standard version is as follows. Apart from one or two brave souls like Joy Baker, home education by parents was all but unheard of in the UK until the 1970s. Then a few daring pioneers like Iris Harrison and the parents of Oak Reah attempted to undertake it and were quickly pounced on by their local authority. As a result of the court cases against these early home educating parents, the practice gradually became established as lawful and local authorities were reluctantly compelled to acknowledge the right of parents to teach their own children. This is a very neat and appealing scenario, but unfortunately it is also wholly untrue and misleading. The legal action against both the Harrisons and the Reahs began in 1977, the same year that Education Otherwise was founded. Iris Harrison was a founding member of education Otherwise. All this helped create the myth that local authorities were at that time bitterly opposed to home education and determined to stamp it out. This was not really the case at all. There were other home educating parents at that time who were known to their LEAs and had perfectly good relations with them. Take Harry Lawrence, for instance. He began home educating his five year-old daughter Ruth officially in 1976 and nobody turned a hair. Why should they? It was obvious that the child was being educated and also clear that he had a perfect right to teach her at home if he wished, rather than sending her to school.

The reason Iris Harrison was taken to court was not because her children were not being sent to school. It was because she was allowing them to spend their time doing pretty much as they wished. If her daughter wished to play the violin all day, that was fine. Her son preferred tinkering with engines; he was allowed to do that rather than studying maths or science. In the case of Oak Reah's parents, it was not because they were home educating that they ended up in court. He was not the only home educated child in Leeds; none of the other parents were having any problems. It was the fact that Oak's parents refused to answer any letters or tell anybody what provision was being made for his education that they were prosecuted.

In short, thirty five years ago, just as now, local authorities were prepared to accept home education. What they were uneasy about were families that would either refuse to tell them what they were doing or were not apparently educating their children. Most teachers are well aware that individualised, one-to-one tuition in a relaxed, domestic setting is a fantastically effective method of teaching. Education professionals know perfectly well that children can do well in such an educational setting. What they are dubious about is the benefits of allowing a child to direct the course of her own learning. Because when those running Internet support lists for home educating parents say things like,

'obviously education takes place all the time and much can be learnt from surfing the net and watching TV! It is impossible for education not to take place, we're all learning all the time!'

then it sets alarm bells ringing. When parents casually assert that they are not worried if their children cannot read at the age of twelve and that this does not matter at all, this too causes massive concern. It is these sort of attitudes which pose the real threat to home education in this country and it is this sort of mentality which makes local authorities demand extra powers so that they can ensure that children aged between five and sixteen are provided with the efficient education which is their legal entitlement. The threat to home education is coming not from the local authorities or the Department for Education, but from those within the home educating community who raise the fear that many children who are not at school are nor really being educated at all.

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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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How can we simply refuse monitoring?

A couple of days ago, somebody asked here for advice on frustrating the best efforts of her local authority to ensure that all the children within their area were receiving a suitable education. The question asked was, 'How can we simply refuse monitoring?' This is a common enough desire on the part of some home educating parents and although I have dealt with this question before, it will do no harm to run over the basics again for newcomers to home education.

The first rule is to make it quite clear to your local authority right from the start that they are dealing with a troublesome crank, rather than an ordinary parent. Sometimes just refusing to allow a local authority officer to visit your home will be enough to give this impression, but if this doesn't work then telling them 'We're autonomous!' will usually do the trick. It is as well that they know from the very beginning what sort of person they are dealing with. This is important, because you want the local authority to realise early on that you are the kind of person who will be complaining to her MP or getting the local paper involved if they hassle you too much by asking questions or trying to insist on visiting your home. Here's an old dodge which some have found useful. Why not simply quote chapter and verse of the relevant legislation when replying to an informal enquiry about your child's education? This will leave nobody in any doubt at all that you are a bloody minded, barrack-room lawyer type.

How can one get away with providing no evidence whatsoever to the local authority? This is not really as hard as it sounds. Begin by downloading an educational philosophy from ;

http://www.home-education.org.uk/ed-philos.htm


These have proved a great hit in the past. Just add your kid's name to the document and you're in business! You will end up with something along these lines;

Our approach to John's education is in the main opportunity-based,
child-led and very flexible. It is impossible to provide a timetable or to
specify in advance which activities we shall be undertaking.
We work to keep a good balance between child-led, informal learning
and a more directed approach. In general, it is our aim to facilitate
learning through John's interests rather than artificially contrived
situations to reach pre-determined outcomes. We are always vigilant for any gaps which should arise in our provision and ready, willing and able
to make the necessary adjustments to fill them.

Notice the cunning way in which you can avoid actually saying what your child is doing or learning. He could be an infant prodigy who also excels at athletics; he could equally well be blind, non-verbal, learning disabled and in a wheelchair. This is a vital gambit in your attempts to keep the local authority at bay. By keeping it completely vague in this way, you ensure that your local authority won't be able to work out what level your child should actually be working at. This is of course why it was essential to oppose vigorously the recommendation in Graham Badman's report which suggested that parents should provide a statement of educational intent for the coming year. Heavens, if once the local authority had that in their hands, they might be able to work out next year that your child hadn't learned a damned thing over the last twelve months!

Sometimes local authorities will ask for more 'evidence'. No need to panic. Why not take a photograph of your child looking at a tree or doing some baking? You can then claim that these are evidence of studying the environment in a scientific way and doing maths by measuring and calculating in a practical, life-based setting. Impossible to prove you wrong about that! The 'diary' is another popular ruse that many parents have found to pay dividends. Just get an old exercise book and write down dates. Under each date, put down some educational activities. This can be going to the library, visiting a museum, conducting experiments in the kitchen; almost anything at all really. Don't worry about being too accurate or truthful, it's not as though anybody is going to check up on all this.

Occasionally, you may get a stubborn local authority officer who is not prepared to take your word for it that your child is being educated. This can be a real pain. In such a case, try this. You should already by this stage have sent a succession of strange, oddly worded and angry letters full of long words to your local authority. (Always remember to copy these to the comments sections of Internet lists and blogs. Other home educators will get a real buzz from seeing how cleverly you have managed to portray yourself to non-home educators as somebody suffering from a massive social skills deficit combined with borderline personality disorder!) Presumably by now you will also have dazzled them with your knowledge of Section 7 of the 1996 Education Act, the Education (Pupil Registration) (England) Regulations 2006, Education and Inspections Act 2006, Children Act 2004 and Sections 436a and 437 of the education Act 1996. You should also have demonstrated a mastery of the relevant case law. Now go in for the kill by reminding the local authority of the 2007 Guidelines for local authorities on elective home education. You can find them here;

http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/everychildmatters/publications/elective/


These contain some wonderful stuff about local authorities not being able to insist on visits and so on. This ought to get them off your case; after all, this is official government advice to them.

Any reasonably inventive parent should have no difficulty at all in refusing to be monitored by their local authority by following the simple points which I have outlined above. If you really find yourself stuck, then why not join the EO and HE-UK Internet lists? There you will find groups of like minded individuals. People just like you, who are all obsessively anxious to avoid having their children's education scrutinised by those best placed to judge its efficacy; i.e. the education department of the local authority. It has only been possible to sketch out the main points of strategy in this piece, but on the EO and HE-UK lists you will find plenty of people ready to help you with more specific advice.

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The triumph of autonomous education!

There are still a few misguided souls who have the vague idea that autonomous education has something to do with home schooling! Nothing could be further from the truth. Autonomous of course means self-directed and really relates to the fact that a child is able to choose for herself what form or direction her learning should take. This can include choosing to study structured courses via the Open University or even going to school or college. This much, all advocates of autonomous education would agree upon. As a number of irate parents who commented on my piece a few days ago called ' A curious case of apparently autonomous education' asserted very strongly, one must always take the parents' word for what the child has chosen to do. Raising one's eyebrows at what a mother calls the decision of an autonomously educated child to study for GCSEs is rude and disrespectful of the whole idea of autonomous education. This seems reasonable because, as I remarked yesterday, we never get to hear what the kids themselves want; so we are compelled to take their parents' word for it.

Having cleared the ground a little, I have to tell readers that I have glorious news for them. Autonomous education seems to be far and away the most popular form of educational technique used in the United Kingdom today! How have I discovered this and what is my evidence for this astonishing assertion? I started from the viewpoint that if, as many of those posting comments here have told me time and again, an autonomously educated child can choose to attend school or college at the age of fourteen in order to gain GCSEs or A levels, then it must logically be the case that a child could also make this choice at thirteen and still remain autonomously educated. And why stop at thirteen? Surely a child of eleven or twelve who wishes to go to school must also be regarded as following autonomous education? I see no reason at all why this principle should not apply right down to four or five.

The beginning of my research was with my friends and colleagues. I only spoke to parents of course, because as we established here a few days ago, one must not doubt the word of parents when it comes to judging the wishes of their children. They know best. I therefore asked parents known to me personally the following questions; 'Did your child want to go to school?' and 'If you gave your child a choice now, would she rather attend school or be taught at home by you?' These questions were asked of seventeen parents having between them thirty six children between the ages of five and sixteen. The results were interesting. All but three of the children apparently wanted to go to school. Only one would choose not to attend now if given the choice. This suggests to me that these four children out of a total of thirty six, amount to a little over 10% of the sample; that is to say that almost 90% chose to go to school and are choosing to remain there and study formally. This is very heartening, but the immediate objection will of course be; how representative do I think my friends are? I have anticipated this. Only two of our friends are not white and most are middle class. Luckily, my wife works with a very working class client group in Barking and I have quite a few parents whom I visit in LB Hackney and Tower Hamlets. Since I was helping out by organising activities at my wife's place of work this week, I had the opportunity to speak to eleven parents there. Between them, they had fourteen children between the ages of five and sixteen. Over half this group are black and minority ethnic. Only one child in this group was reported by his mother to have not wanted to attend school. One would like to leave now. Again, almost a 90% rate of autonomy among the children; they are choosing their own preferred method of education. I repeated this survey with similar results among a group of black and Asian parents in Hackney and Tower Hamlets.

I can see two possible explanations for these findings. The first is that I should take them at face value and assume that autonomous education is the most popular method of education in the United Kingdom today. In other words, most children are actively choosing the educational setting which they wish. I have to say that this does not seem likely to me. The other possibility is less palatable to some parents. It is this. Parents themselves choose the educational setting which they would prefer for their children, whether it is school or home education. After they have taken this decision, they persuade both themselves, their children and everybody else that this is what the children really wanted in the first place. In effect, they rewrite history and kid everybody that the child has had a choice in the matter. I will at once put my own hand up to having done this! Talking to close friends and exploring the questions which I posed to them recently reveals that a similar process has taken place with at least some children who have been sent to school.

Many parents who send their children to school effectively brainwash them into accepting their fate. They buy them books called 'Jimmy has lots of fun at school' or 'Jemima's happy first day at school'. They repeat over and over again, the mantras 'You will make lots of new friends at school' and 'You will have a good time at school'. By the time they get there, the children have been hypnotised and are incapable of resisting all this psychological conditioning. Of course home educating parents do exactly the same thing. I used to point out to my daughter how lucky she was not to be cooped up indoors on a lovely sunny day and how many enjoyable things we did which she couldn't have done if she had gone to school. I know other home educators who did the same thing. In some cases, the kid actually wanted to go to school and the mothers have discouraged them and worked hard to make them change their minds! One reads of such cases on the Internet lists; mothers who say that their child wants to go to school and they want advice on how they can discourage her. Oddly, I have never seen a response to questions like this where the parent is urged to respect the child's autonomous wishes! Instead, a variety of handy tips are offered to get the kid to change his mind. This is just what some parents do who persuade their children against their inclination that they really do want to go to school.

Perhaps we are all of us deceiving ourselves. I think that what really happens might be that rather than carefully respecting our children's choices, we simply make what seems to us the best decision for them and forge ahead regardless. I rather think that home educating parents are just as apt to do this as anybody else. I'm sure that if I carried out a survey among home educating parents I should find just the same results as I did among the parents of school children. I've no reason at all though to think it any more likely that these children were really having their own free and unfettered choices acted upon.

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Home education and the curse of anecdata

I am grateful to my daughter for teaching me about the word 'anecdata' in recent months. This word could have been coined with home education in mind! Anecdata means presenting various scraps of anecdotal evidence together in such a way as to suggest that it supports some pseudo-scientific idea; in other words presenting random, isolated stories together in such a way as to make them look like proper data.

One of the things that I have noticed time and again when dealing with home educators and talking about home education is that it is very tricky to pin down facts and figures. I am frequently assured, for example, that FE colleges will accept people on to courses without any previous qualifications. The same is said of universities. Whenever I ask for the names of these institutions, they never seem to be forthcoming. This happened during a recent exchange on here. After I had cast doubt upon the chances of studying at university without having any formal qualifications, somebody told me,

'I spoke to a home educator recently whose child has been accepted on a postgraduate course despite not having a degree.'

This is actually quite exciting, but when I tried to find out the details, it turned out that this was another of those cases where it boiled down to the equivalent of, 'A man in the pub told me.....' . No possible way of checking the facts. This is how it is with so many stories about home education; they end up with vague accounts which are impossible to follow up. Now twenty vague stories from unidentified sources do not impress me more than one such story. This is what is meant by anecdata, a collection of anecdotes which together are supposed to be as good as properly collected and verified data. The reason that these sorts of data do not really support any idea or theory is that one unsubstantiated account by itself is worthless. So are two, twenty or a hundred. It is not the case that the more vague and unidentified witnesses one can cite, the more reliable is the thesis being presented. If that were the case then we would all believe in flying saucers or homeopathy!

We see anecdata being used again and again in discussions of home education. This is such a useful word; I am surprised that nobody coined it long ago. The autonomous acquisition of literacy for instance is almost invariably supported by this kind of 'evidence'. people often claim, 'I know that children can learn to read like this because that's how my children learned'. What can one say about this? Without personal knowledge of the family in question, it is hard to judge this claim. is the person making it generally truthful? Does she have a mental health problem? Is she really even a home educator? Did her children learn to read without being taught? It is quite impossible to answer any of these questions. The person is typically anonymous and we are invited to take her word for an extraordinary assertion. Sometimes it is presented in the form of, 'My children and many of those of fellow autonomous educators'. This is no better really, we still don't know how much credence to place upon the word of an unknown stranger.

It is for these reasons that attempts are regularly made to gather real, verifiable data about home education. Such efforts are almost invariably viewed with suspicion and parents urge each other not to take part. The participation rate in such surveys never rises above 20%. This at once rings alarm bells for any objective observer. After all, for years these dramatic claims have been made about the efficacy of this treatment and yet when an attempt is made to examine these claims and verify them; nobody wants to participate. This makes the thing look more like a pseudo-scientific enterprise along the lines of some quack remedy rather than a genuine pedagogic technique. Most practitioners and devotees of proper medical treatments and educational systems are quite happy to allow sceptical researchers in to look at what they are doing. Those who are reluctant to do so are usually followers of some crank ideology who have an inherent fear of opening it up to the gaze of unbelievers. This is fine if what is happening is s religion. For instance in my church, claims are made for the transformation of the host into something different. This is not a scientific claim and no amount of measuring or analysis would reveal the supposed changes. There is nothing wrong with this, it is simply an irrational belief that some of us hold. I recognise this and am quite happy with it. But some home educators make the claim that their ideas produce quantifiable changes in children and their minds. If this is so, then it should be possible to measure and observe these changes. At this pint though, the additional claim is made that to measure these changes would be to destroy them and wreck the whole process. If we are to take them only on trust and not allowed to look too closely for fear of harming the activity, then we can be pretty sure that we are not dealing with a scientific or rational enterprise at all, but something as peculiar as the transubstantiation of the host into the body of Christ. In other words, it makes autonomous education into a religion or faith rather than an educational method.

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