kids who stay home to be educated will only achieve the same level as the parents teaching them

"kids who stay home to be educated will only achieve the same level as the parents teaching them. Usually we want our kids to do much better than we did and have better futures than us. it's only natural.. If the parents achieved degree level at college/university, then their kids should be fine with home studying.. However if they were near drop outs that barely scraped by in school, then the kids have no hope."

False, at odds with the research. Actually kids from homes with less educational achievement show a greater advantage from being home educated.

Alan Thomas

Paula Rothermerle sp

and others
 

All my children went to secular school! You can't offer them as good an experience! And update on our home ed outcome.

"All my children went to secular school and grew up having faced trials and tribulations of what a school experience offers. There are limitations to home schooling and a child needs to experience all aspects of life to develop and that includes the good the bad and the ugly.. Your child cannot achieve its full potential sitting in the house"

Sorry this is from Loose Women, not sure she meant secular school but she was sure she was right.

You don't know this, you didn't do it. No child can experience all aspects of life we live in too varied times. If you didn't home educate you can only speculate on the limitations of home education.

"My neighbours kids are home schooled and the children spend more time running round the back garden and walking the dog."

Ah you know unless you watch them 23/7 you can't really know. There is no such thing as school time in home education and learning can happen any time. walking my dogs is one of the most social things I do. My own child would have looked like she had no school time cause she didn't, she learnt through exploring things she found fun. It is called autonomous education. She is now doing a levels at college and shocked that her friends have had that timetable all their lives while she has run free. 

"Interesting.. What a shock she will get when she enters the world of work.. That's what school prepare children for."

She is doing 3 A levels, Maths, Further Maths and Chemistry alongside tennis coaching lol. She is a level one coaching assistant and has already had paid work. She got on to those courses with no previous formal learning just her own love of exploring the subjects. She is up and out and does not miss lessons, it is her choice, her investment, if she wanted to leave she could, if she wanted to be late she could. She isn't, she doesn't want to, it is all her own very passionate choice. Why would a child that could do that not be able to hold down a job. Stick to your rigid ideas if you must but she could probably run rings around you on most subjects and certainly in having an open mind and being interested in the truth and not prejudice. (Many people were engaging with this woman who just was not listening)  Children are not lazy sods unless coerced and forced, left to make their own choices they are almost always amazing! She is my fourth child so I know about school and I still have the scars from protecting my kids from very wrong assumptions regarding the capacity of neurodiverse children who develop in a completely different way. 

She is also a volunteer peer tutor to a mature student who has seen her marks rise three levels after only a couple of weeks of her help. You really really do not know what you are talking about. She has been asked to be part of the interview process for many new appointments and he college has gone out of its way to allow her to study these A levels as she has no GCSE's. They have created a workaround, her mentor has done some autonomous learning to make sure she can stay. She is typical of the home educated children I see news of, moving on to formal education in the groups and amongst my many fb home ed friends. This is the expected result of home ed. And you would have to look very hard to find a home ed adult who is not working, running their own business, thriving at uni or following their dream.

"Good teachers make sure children are learning at their own pace, while still being stretched - and any teacher worth their salt can make the learning fun."

I think teachers are more and more handicapped by government demands that do not align with what we know about child development, in fact go entirely opposite to it. That may have been true once although in a childhood where I was often in staff rooms as my school had different holidays to my mother's and my own schooling and my four kid's experience I do not recognise that claim to be true, it is harder now than ever to do that. Teachers are drowning in directives and paperwork and all that matters to their masters is what the statistics look like. But however good they are it would be hard for them to match an education tailored exactly to the child's needs, preferences and developmental level.  

"I speak from experience when as a teacher I have had to help children to catch up with their peers."

"Well we've never met any teachers like that. Most just don't want them to fall behind, but again what are they behind of."

That shaming phrase, fall behind, fall behind an imaginary norm, all children are unique, that norm will be at the wrong place for most of them although some are resilient enough to manage. Home educated children are rescued from that shaming blaming system. It is a shame if some have to go back, especially if it is not a choice but circumstance but there is no way of knowing if they would not have been more "behind" if they had stayed in school. Many children in schools are behind this imaginary marker of success. It is not the kids who always match this norm who do best in life, I feel sorry for those who excel at school and find that actually life is nothing like it.

 

Why are schools monitored?

As a home educator you do not have to inform the council if you never register at a school, education is a parental responsibility even when delegated to the state. 

Home education is exactly equal in law to school education. 

Schools are registered and monitored because they are paid out of the public purse to educate other people's children. 

Parents of home educated children are not spending taxpayers money hence no oversight. 

Home educated children are subject to the same child protection laws that all children are.

So you are telling me that daily they get to discuss their beliefs with others and challenge their upbringing?

That is so not what happens in schools. In many schools children who tried to do that would be bullied. But yes, not every day maybe except with their parents and why would that be necessary. But yes they do - if they want to - we are interested in our child's education we are not brain washers we have no home ed curriculum that every child must follow.

Suitable Education

There is no definition of suitable, not the detailed chronological achievement linked definition that those who think all parents are unsafe to do the best for their kids would like. They don't dare because again it would apply to schools also, many of which are self evidently not providing a suitable education to many children and certainly not one suitable "(a) to his age, ability and aptitude, and
(b) to any special educational needs he may have" It would be very difficult for an LA bod to judge and they actually have no power to do so. They do not know the aptitude or needs of the child. And the norm is a prejudice towards education that looks like school and most home education doesn't and is all the more successful for it.

If they had a proactive duty to ensure they could be sued  by all the children and parents they let down. It would be difficult to do so because education is a parental duty and parents who send their child to unsuitable schools are breaking the law. Odd that there is no call to prosecute them though as they are by definition likely to be in far greater number.   

At primary level perhaps this does not matter so much because it is believed that children at this level are not able to master the material at such complex levels as, say, secondary children are

Well this is where school is wrong for so many children, children like mine are very able to but they are not able to write it down till secondary level, or not sufficiently to demonstrate the sophistication of their understanding. They have problems transposing numbers so make mistakes in simple maths but later go on to understand complex proofs and logic with relative ease. Primary school especially is abusive as performance is all that matters, performance and stats. School tells these children that they are unintelligent and a failure and how many never learn different, I had no idea of how very wrong they were about me until well into my 50s. Home ed lets the child learn and teach through conversation, hard to imagine how school could match it. Perhaps if it became a resource to help children answer their many questions rather that shut up sit down keep still stop talking. Due to my own dire and abusive education where I was blamed and shamed for having a different brain not a plodding sequential one but a leaps and spurts and make odd connections one I have protected my children from the damage schools do to people like us. We are the wrong shape for mass teaching, but I have learnt a lot about learning and child psychology and development in the process. Good luck with your Phd, it would be wonderful if a change that protected neurodiverse kids from plodding repetitive curricula and being profoundly misunderstood could could be instigated but you must know that government usually go in exactly the opposite direction of what quality research suggests would be efficacious.

Thing is children who are home educated can play through the primary years and pick up everything that is taught so laboriously to the children trapped in the classroom for so many hours, so many years, as a bi product of play and curiosity.

And answers to questions and challenges - I rather think promoting "hate of a minority group" is a bit pejorative and a tad on the hysterical side."

 No it's not, not at all, have you noticed how much is in the news right now about a child let down by social services many years ago. A child about whom there is no SCR, a child whose parents have not been prosecuted. 

It is duplicitous, the child was not hidden, he was let down an neglected by the state. The parents were not prosecuted so it is not obvious that it was abuse, it is sad and perhaps support could have made a difference but the social work dept did not know the law around their own job. They failed a child that had been reported to them, they had every power to insist on seeing the child but they didn't bother. Nothing to do with education but everything to do with poor quality badly trained social workers. 

It is manipulation to distract from authority failings, many many

And they want to meddle in home education rather than improve the poor services that failed him. Doing so would fail him again and all children who die because of incompetent and poorly trained child protection agencies. 

It is a con to make them look like they are doing something but that something wouldn't touch on the actual problem, it would remove attention and funding from it. If you were a home educator you would know that these unwarranted attacks are constant and always with no actual evidence. 

 It is immoral and promoting wasting money direly needed by LAs like Pembrokshire to properly train their social workers or recruit people capable of learning. It is politically motivated, and promoted by agencies like the NSPCC who have been trying to get control of us for years using lies and manipulation seeing a rent seeking and mission creep reward.

All these SCRs in 2016 and the NSPCC push for registration and monitoring because of 7 over 6 years involving home education where every single one was a known child let down by government agencies just as this child was.

And they know this because they have published them all. 

Starting to put some of my comments made on media discussing registration of home educators here, this is for those who have swallowed The Badman Report whole.

Graham Badman's report was thoroughly debunked by far sharper minds than his including Graham Stuart in the select committee inquiry into the report.

 Q13 Mr. Stuart: In any case in which a child is known to be on a child protection plan, will it, by necessity, mean that that child is known to the local authorities?

Graham Badman: Yes.

 Q14 Mr. Stuart: So, if the numbers that were formally known about were approximately double your best estimate, it would take us back to almost precisely where we started, at the average of the population as a whole.

Graham Badman: I'm sorry, I don't understand the question.

 "Q15 Mr. Stuart: Well, if there are twice as many children in home education than are formally known about, which by definition includes all those for whom there is a child protection plan, it would suggest that, roughly speaking, you were back to 0.2% of the home-educated population having a child protection plan, which would put them in line with the national average.

Graham Badman: I think that it propels the figures the other way. It would actually make the proportion higher, because they are already included in the overall population and in the subset of the population, which would mean that the percentage will be fractionally higher. It works the other way."

Worrying that he was a maths teacher in a previous life.

"AFTER the report had been issued and roundly criticized by home educators, Badman conducted a third survey of LEAs to try to get a larger sample size.  Badman claimed that this third sample was representative, but Stafford argues that it in fact was biased toward urban areas.  Stafford here pulls out all the stops, for his concern is not so much about what all this means for home education but that government policy is being made on such flimsy grounds."

I could produce many many other links, the report was trying to produce policy based evidence and used quotes in a very misleading and dishonest way.

This is the submission by the church of england.

"24 Our submission was, naturally, designed to be read as a whole, but following the publication of Graham Badman's report, officers in the Education Division were disappointed with the impression left by the selective use of our submission.

25 We are concerned that the quotation from our submission used in the report appeared to have been selected to support the terms of reference of the review, which, whilst acknowledging that parents have a well-established right to educate their children at home and indicating that the Government had no plans to change that position, appeared overly concerned with the possibility of home educating being a cover for abuse, barriers to safeguarding responsibilities and possible changes to the regime of monitoring and support of LAs.

26 In fact, we specifically stated that in making prevention of abuse under the cover of home education the main reason for the Review has the effect of tarnishing the reputation of the many parents who choose to home education their children from the best of motives."

Even the police are not allowed to force a child to see them alone, social workers are only allowed to with evidence of harm.  To allow council workers with no training in either home education or child welfare to have the same power would be very dangerous and open to abuse. 

There is nothing in the law around home education that stops social services doing their job, a register would not help when social services already know that the child exists and have been warned about it and do not act on the information.