One of the saddest things one ever encounters in the world of home education is watching that moment when a parent realises that the dogged pursuit of ideology has irrevocably screwed up a child’s life. Sometimes this moment is almost invisible. For example, seeing a mother on a blog who says, ‘We have decided not to do GCSEs’. Because it is of course parents who arrange and pay for the taking of such examinations, this may be translated as, ‘I have decided that my child will not be taking GCSEs’. Sometimes, this particular decision is not altogether catastrophic for a home educated child. It is still possible to find some Further Education colleges which will allow a child in without GCSEs, although this is becoming rarer every year. Even then, it will seldom be for A levels and so the parent’s decision has effectively restricted the kid’s life chances at the age of twelve or thirteen. Even if she takes A levels, many universities will raise their eyebrows if she applies without having any GCSEs as well.
What is even worse that the above scenario is the parents who steadfastly refuses, and teaches her child to refuse, to consider gaining any formal qualifications up to the age of seventeen and then still hopes to be able to swing a place at university. Often, these people have been lured on in their folly by the story of Ian Dowty’s son getting into Oxford without any GCSEs or A levels and are unaware of the background to this story. They breeze up to some university in the Russell Group when their daughter or son is seventeen and try to get the child in on the strength of a portfolio or life experiences. This is truly tragic, because they have not the slightest chance of succeeding in this endeavour. Here is a very well-known home educator having this ‘Eureka’ moment of discovery last week. She writes:
Has anyone had any success with Edinburgh University?
We've just had a disappointing response to my home educating daughter's enquiry about what they 'need' for entrance. The bod suggests that my daughter put her home educating experience in her 'personal statement' and I feel like suggesting where the bod should put a copy of her mechanical response to student enquiries.
It's the usual demand for A levels or an Access Course.
Yet when we went up for the Open Day the head of the department was quite positive about her chances.
XXXXX
P.S. She wants to study Japanese at University level and Edinburgh's MA is 'supposed' to be the 'best'.
I find this almost literally unbelievable. Approaching one of the best universities in the United Kingdom without any A levels and hoping for her child to be given a place on the say-so of the mother! I am particularly enchanted by the anger she expresses towards Edinburgh University, as though it is somehow their fault that she has not arranged for her daughter to take A levels! Here is a woman who took her daughter on a misguided and foolish educational journey, only to find that the result is likely to be complete failure for the child. Can anybody imagine anything sadder?
Showing posts with label GCSE. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GCSE. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Friday, September 7, 2012
Making money out of home education
Those who hang around on home educating forums and lists on the internet will probably be familiar with the expression ‘rent seeker’. It is meant to describe a particular type of home educator who hopes to make money out of home education by hiring herself, or himself, out to local authorities or central government and charging for services. I have myself been accused of this and of course the archetypal ’rent seeker’, at least according to some, gave evidence to the select committee a couple of days ago.
Now I am all in favour of private enterprise in such matters, but I am also pleased to see the state getting in on this act as well and so was enchanted to see a local authority attempting to turn home education into a money-spinner. As readers probably know, it is possible for local authorities to obtain funding for home educated children to attend college once they are fourteen. Here is a local authority discussing this among themselves:
http://www.buckscc.gov.uk/moderngov/Published/C00000461/M00004827/AI00019641/$ProposaltoreclaimFundingforElectiveHomeEducated.docA.ps.pdf
Notice incidentally how home educators are ‘challenging’ the local authority to provide the funding! Not just asking or requesting. Interesting too to note one of their motives in agreeing to such requests:
BCSB is, therefore, supportive of any mechanisms which
may enable the local authority to track and monitor the education, safety and wellbeing
of those children who are receiving a home education.
Still, this is all to the good. Home educated children are actually getting to attend college and study for nothing, as the government has explicitly stated that they may. Some authorities though have scented an opportunity to make a bob or two from all this; the London Borough of Bexley, for example. Take a look at this:
http://www.adultedbexley.co.uk/SubjectHomeEd1.html
You will see that they are specifically targeting home educators and charging them cash upfront. You might be able to claim some of this back, but this is by no means certain. I have tried in vain to find out from Bexley whether any poor sap has actually been fleeced in this way, but they are strangely reluctant to discuss the matter or even say if anybody has handed over cash for one of these courses. I wonder if anybody knows any other local authority trying this on?
Now I am all in favour of private enterprise in such matters, but I am also pleased to see the state getting in on this act as well and so was enchanted to see a local authority attempting to turn home education into a money-spinner. As readers probably know, it is possible for local authorities to obtain funding for home educated children to attend college once they are fourteen. Here is a local authority discussing this among themselves:
http://www.buckscc.gov.uk/moderngov/Published/C00000461/M00004827/AI00019641/$ProposaltoreclaimFundingforElectiveHomeEducated.docA.ps.pdf
Notice incidentally how home educators are ‘challenging’ the local authority to provide the funding! Not just asking or requesting. Interesting too to note one of their motives in agreeing to such requests:
BCSB is, therefore, supportive of any mechanisms which
may enable the local authority to track and monitor the education, safety and wellbeing
of those children who are receiving a home education.
Still, this is all to the good. Home educated children are actually getting to attend college and study for nothing, as the government has explicitly stated that they may. Some authorities though have scented an opportunity to make a bob or two from all this; the London Borough of Bexley, for example. Take a look at this:
http://www.adultedbexley.co.uk/SubjectHomeEd1.html
You will see that they are specifically targeting home educators and charging them cash upfront. You might be able to claim some of this back, but this is by no means certain. I have tried in vain to find out from Bexley whether any poor sap has actually been fleeced in this way, but they are strangely reluctant to discuss the matter or even say if anybody has handed over cash for one of these courses. I wonder if anybody knows any other local authority trying this on?
Monday, August 27, 2012
The trouble with ALAN
It is not uncommon to read or hear statements by home educating parents to the effect of, ‘we have decided not to do GCSEs’. Since it is usually parents who possess both the money and knowledge to arrange the things, this may be better translated as, ’I have decided that my child will not be taking any GCSEs’.
I have discussed before here the disadvantages for home educated children of not having GCSEs. These range from difficulty in getting a place at college when they are sixteen to limiting the choice of university at eighteen or nineteen. Still, as I have been reminded, not everybody wishes to go into further or higher education. Some young people are eager to enter the world of work at once. Here too, problems can arise form the decision not to sit GCSEs. When over 99% of children in the country are taking GCSEs or IGCSEs, those without a single one to their name do tend to stand out somewhat and not in a favourable way. The news that a sixteen or seventeen year old has not attended school for some years and has no GCSEs suggests to many potential employers that he has either been excluded, has learning difficulties and/or has feckless parents. This is an unfortunate impression to be creating when looking for work! Not everybody is familiar with home education and even those who have heard of it can have difficulty working out whether or not a child who has been subjected to this experimental procedure has the necessary skills to make him a valuable member of the workforce. In short, how does the employer know that this young person can read and write, carry out arithmetical operations and so on? For many parents , the answer is for their child to sit adult literacy and numeracy tests.
Here is some information about adult literacy and numeracy tests or ALAN for short:
http://www.edexcel.com/migrationdocuments/Adult%20Literacy%20and%20Adult%20Numeracy/ALAN%20brochure%20for%20web%2030-4-09_A4.pdf
These are pretty popular with home educating parents as a way of proving that their child is literate. They are supposedly the equivalent of a GCSE, although in reality they are nothing of the sort. They certainly demonstrate that a teenager can read, write and do simple sums, but that is about it. Still, surely this is better than nothing? It at least provides some evidence for an employer that an applicant is not utterly lacking in academic skills. Sadly, these things are not a brilliant advertisement for children. The very phrase, ’adult literacy’, brings forth images and associations to the average mind which would better be left untouched.
For the ordinary person, the expression ’adult literacy’ is connected with ’illiteracy’. Adult literacy courses, adult literacy qualifications and so on are widely thought to be remedial activities undertaken by adults who did not learn to read and write while they were at school. This is not at all the impression that one hopes to make when applying for a job; that one was until recently illiterate! Most employers glance at educational qualifications and want only to see five ’good’ GCSEs. Anything less than this marks an applicant out at once and not in a good way. The thought that somebody has not attended school and as a result has taken adult literacy qualifications is not really a good start.
Parents might think a little carefully about how their child will present to the outside world in later years. It is all well and good that home educated children are, at least according to their parents, cleverer, more sensitive, spiritual, creative and compassionate than other children. None of this will be much use if they look to outsiders like hopeless dropouts that have been learning to read and write at remedial classes!
I have discussed before here the disadvantages for home educated children of not having GCSEs. These range from difficulty in getting a place at college when they are sixteen to limiting the choice of university at eighteen or nineteen. Still, as I have been reminded, not everybody wishes to go into further or higher education. Some young people are eager to enter the world of work at once. Here too, problems can arise form the decision not to sit GCSEs. When over 99% of children in the country are taking GCSEs or IGCSEs, those without a single one to their name do tend to stand out somewhat and not in a favourable way. The news that a sixteen or seventeen year old has not attended school for some years and has no GCSEs suggests to many potential employers that he has either been excluded, has learning difficulties and/or has feckless parents. This is an unfortunate impression to be creating when looking for work! Not everybody is familiar with home education and even those who have heard of it can have difficulty working out whether or not a child who has been subjected to this experimental procedure has the necessary skills to make him a valuable member of the workforce. In short, how does the employer know that this young person can read and write, carry out arithmetical operations and so on? For many parents , the answer is for their child to sit adult literacy and numeracy tests.
Here is some information about adult literacy and numeracy tests or ALAN for short:
http://www.edexcel.com/migrationdocuments/Adult%20Literacy%20and%20Adult%20Numeracy/ALAN%20brochure%20for%20web%2030-4-09_A4.pdf
These are pretty popular with home educating parents as a way of proving that their child is literate. They are supposedly the equivalent of a GCSE, although in reality they are nothing of the sort. They certainly demonstrate that a teenager can read, write and do simple sums, but that is about it. Still, surely this is better than nothing? It at least provides some evidence for an employer that an applicant is not utterly lacking in academic skills. Sadly, these things are not a brilliant advertisement for children. The very phrase, ’adult literacy’, brings forth images and associations to the average mind which would better be left untouched.
For the ordinary person, the expression ’adult literacy’ is connected with ’illiteracy’. Adult literacy courses, adult literacy qualifications and so on are widely thought to be remedial activities undertaken by adults who did not learn to read and write while they were at school. This is not at all the impression that one hopes to make when applying for a job; that one was until recently illiterate! Most employers glance at educational qualifications and want only to see five ’good’ GCSEs. Anything less than this marks an applicant out at once and not in a good way. The thought that somebody has not attended school and as a result has taken adult literacy qualifications is not really a good start.
Parents might think a little carefully about how their child will present to the outside world in later years. It is all well and good that home educated children are, at least according to their parents, cleverer, more sensitive, spiritual, creative and compassionate than other children. None of this will be much use if they look to outsiders like hopeless dropouts that have been learning to read and write at remedial classes!
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
‘A’s are for losers…
I have had to abandon this blog for a while to meet a deadline, however, normal service is now resumed. I shall be looking in the next couple of days at the idea of compulsion, which seems to be so baffling to at least one reader; compulsion in her mind being associated only with punishment or physical force! Before that, I want to talk about the awful situation at British secondary schools, with reference to what are known as grade boundaries. These have a pernicious effect upon children unfortunate enough to attend school.
When my daughter was studying for both GCSEs and A levels, I had a saying that I used frequently with her. This was, ‘A's are for losers!’ I meant to convey by this that if she gained only an ‘A’ in an examination, rather than ‘A*’; then as far as I was concerned, she would have failed that particular examination. Nothing less than 100% was satisfactory, whether she was working at home with me or sitting an IGCSE. There are a number of possibilities for this attitude on my part. One would be that I am a man obsessed with GCSEs and their importance in life. Another might perhaps be that I am a male, Caucasian version of the notorious Chinese ‘Tiger Mothers’. A third and, to me at least, more likely explanation would be that I am not a bloody fool and that I know how the world actually works outside of school and examinations. Let me make this a little clearer.
In a deplorable lapse of judgement, I allowed my older daughter to be registered at school. Apart from a spell of flexi-schooling, she was at school all the way through until leaving at sixteen. When she was fifteen, a year or so before she was due to take her GCSEs, I noticed that her maths was atrocious. She was getting around half the questions wrong and yet her teacher was marking the work with things like, ‘Well done’. When I spoke to this woman she explained that from her point of view this was fine. It was not because my daughter was unable to do any better, it was that there would have been no point. In the GCSE, which mark you get depends on the percentage of marks you score. These are the grade boundaries. Incredibly, if you get over 50%, you get an ‘A’ in mathematics for GCSE. Over 70% and you will have an ‘A*’ Because my daughter was in line for at least an ‘A’ and possibly an ‘A*’, she was doing as well as could possibly be achieved. What purpose would have been served by trying to get her to get three quarters of her work right? It would have been overkill; way over the grade boundary for an ‘A*’. I resisted the temptation to slay this idiot on the spot; in retrospect, a matter of some regret.
Let’s forget for a moment about schools and GCSEs. I have only recently, after a long struggle, resolved the problems I have been having with the Student Finance people over the loan my daughter is getting for university. I sent in almost everything necessary. The only problem related to an income of £60.75, for which I provided no documentation and had overlooked when filling out the form. You might have thought that they would have given me a gold star for this, or at the very least congratulated me on getting over 95% of the calculations correct. Even a ‘Well done’ would have been nice. They did none of these things, because of course this is real life. Anything less than 100% accuracy means that you fail. It is the same with my tax returns. It is not enough for me to get 70% of the answers right. This will not earn me an ‘A*’ with the Inland Revenue. Not even 80% will do, nor 90% or even 95%. Every figure and all calculations must be 100% correct.
This principle, that of getting 100% all the time in maths is how we have to live our real lives. Whether we are looking at out bank statement, measuring the room for a fitted carpet or working out the change from a £20 note; nothing less than 100% will do. Saying ‘Well done!’ to a child for getting a third of her sums wrong is a false kindness. It does not matter a damn if that will be enough to get her an ‘A*’ at GCSE; getting a lot of sums wrong in real life will be a disaster for her. The same is true of practically every other aspect of life. If I write out a job application and only make errors in spelling a quarter of the words, this will not earn me an ‘A*’ from the potential employer. He will probably dismiss me as illiterate.
Real life is very unforgiving. Most of the time we need to get things right. The penalties for getting things wrong can be pretty severe and you are not awarded marks for effort either! Anybody who does not expect a child to get things 100% right in maths, English or any other subject is leaving the child ill-prepared for the real world. Real life is not about GCSEs or A levels. It is about getting figures 100% right, making sure that not one word is misspelled nor a single capital letter or full stop omitted. Teaching children this and being ferociously demanding about it is the only strategy that will fit them out for the adult world in which they will all too soon find themselves.
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
GCSE related scams for home educators
I have noticed lately that I am apparently turning into one of those unfortunate people that one occasionally encounters in the street; shuffling along and muttering to themselves, while shouting obscenities every so often. In my own case, this behaviour is all too often precipitated by some new idiocy from the world of home education, from which I still seem unable to disengage myself. Perhaps I am suffering from some species of pre-senile dementia. It can’t be normal to read through the various HE lists and start growling, ‘For fuck’s sake!’ to one’s self every few minutes!
What with the Education Committee considering the help available to home educators and Fiona Nicholson beavering away to find out which local authorities are providing help with alternative provision, this strikes me as a good time to consider why so many teachers and local authority officers flee shrieking in terror at the prospect of helping home educating parents to arrange for their children to sit examinations such as GCSEs. This is a big topic and I shall restrict myself today to just one aspect of it.
I was reading an appeal recently by a home educating mother who was trying to secure extra time and rest breaks for her son, so that he could take a GCSE. He would apparently need at least four breaks an hour for there to be any realistic chance of his sitting the examination. She wondered what proof she would need to furnish of her son’s problems. Cue somebody advising her that under the Disability Discrimination Act, she could take a firm line with anybody who doubted her word on the matter. Well why wouldn’t it be enough for a mother simply to explain the facts of the matter to the exam centre and for them just to provide the kid with the extra time or laptop or whatever he needs? The answer is that this whole business has turned into a huge racket in the last few years.
At the local comprehensive, no fewer than 15% of the children sitting GCSEs get extra time and various other things such as scribes or laptops. One child in six! What is truly astonishing is that they are almost without exception the most middle class children with the pushiest and most articulate parents. Rummy indeed! Are middle class children more prone to dyslexia and neurological difficulties? Well, no; it is of course a scam. By getting a report from a tame specialist, which will set you back a few hundred pounds, your child can have two hours to write an essay, rather than just the one hour that all the other children are getting. This is a huge advantage. Nor is this all.
It is also possible to boost your child’s exam marks by pleading a range of special circumstances, ranging from headaches on the day of the exam to being diagnosed with terminal cancer the day before. The one will give you an extra 1%, the other 5%. In between these two extremes are a whole raft of possible life-events; pets falling ill, seeing somebody killed in a road accident, death of a grandmother and so on. By combining a couple of these with dyslexia, you can give your kid a huge advantage in GCSEs.
What is the point of all this though? After all, GCSEs don’t matter all that much, do they? In fact they do matter a great deal if one wishes to get a place at one of the better universities. Oxford and Cambridge expect to see a string of seven or eight A* GCSEs as standard, as do a few other universities in the Russell Group. At less prestigious places, GCSE results are often used as a tiebreaker. If you have a bunch of kids, all with three A levels at A, you can look at their GCSEs; the one with mostly As will often trump the one with mostly Bs.
A natural consequence of all this is that many well informed parents work the system by pretending that their children are dyslectic and have suffered some sort of trauma the day before an exam. This sort of thing is nearly always accepted, but many teachers are getting a bit sick of it. Between them, the exam boards each get over half a million appeals for special consideration every year and only 3% are rejected. With one child in six being given extra time, separate rooms, laptops and so on during GCSEs; it is starting to be plain that this is becoming another tactic by parents to boost their kids’ grades at GCSE from B to A or from A to A*.
I am not of course saying that there is no such thing as dyslexia. Nor am I objecting to children with special educational needs being granted extra help. Rather, I am claiming that middle class parents are using the system to give their children an unfair advantage over the rest and that attempts are now being made to discourage the practice. One of these is to be a bit stricter about which children genuinely have a disability.
I am afraid that home educating parents are famous for wanting special provision for their children. There are a number of possible explanations for this. One is that many home educated children have been withdrawn from school precisely because they had special needs that the school was unable to cater for. Another might be because the parents are predominantly middle class and are therefore using the same scam as many other middle class parents. It may also be the case that they are so used to having their own way and believing their child to be special, that they want different treatment as a matter of course.
Whatever the explanation, and it could well be a mixture of all of the above, it makes fixing up GCSEs for home educators something of a nightmare and is one reason why many places give them a wide berth. In my next piece, I shall look at a few other reasons why so few people seem to want to help home educators to enter their children for exams.
What with the Education Committee considering the help available to home educators and Fiona Nicholson beavering away to find out which local authorities are providing help with alternative provision, this strikes me as a good time to consider why so many teachers and local authority officers flee shrieking in terror at the prospect of helping home educating parents to arrange for their children to sit examinations such as GCSEs. This is a big topic and I shall restrict myself today to just one aspect of it.
I was reading an appeal recently by a home educating mother who was trying to secure extra time and rest breaks for her son, so that he could take a GCSE. He would apparently need at least four breaks an hour for there to be any realistic chance of his sitting the examination. She wondered what proof she would need to furnish of her son’s problems. Cue somebody advising her that under the Disability Discrimination Act, she could take a firm line with anybody who doubted her word on the matter. Well why wouldn’t it be enough for a mother simply to explain the facts of the matter to the exam centre and for them just to provide the kid with the extra time or laptop or whatever he needs? The answer is that this whole business has turned into a huge racket in the last few years.
At the local comprehensive, no fewer than 15% of the children sitting GCSEs get extra time and various other things such as scribes or laptops. One child in six! What is truly astonishing is that they are almost without exception the most middle class children with the pushiest and most articulate parents. Rummy indeed! Are middle class children more prone to dyslexia and neurological difficulties? Well, no; it is of course a scam. By getting a report from a tame specialist, which will set you back a few hundred pounds, your child can have two hours to write an essay, rather than just the one hour that all the other children are getting. This is a huge advantage. Nor is this all.
It is also possible to boost your child’s exam marks by pleading a range of special circumstances, ranging from headaches on the day of the exam to being diagnosed with terminal cancer the day before. The one will give you an extra 1%, the other 5%. In between these two extremes are a whole raft of possible life-events; pets falling ill, seeing somebody killed in a road accident, death of a grandmother and so on. By combining a couple of these with dyslexia, you can give your kid a huge advantage in GCSEs.
What is the point of all this though? After all, GCSEs don’t matter all that much, do they? In fact they do matter a great deal if one wishes to get a place at one of the better universities. Oxford and Cambridge expect to see a string of seven or eight A* GCSEs as standard, as do a few other universities in the Russell Group. At less prestigious places, GCSE results are often used as a tiebreaker. If you have a bunch of kids, all with three A levels at A, you can look at their GCSEs; the one with mostly As will often trump the one with mostly Bs.
A natural consequence of all this is that many well informed parents work the system by pretending that their children are dyslectic and have suffered some sort of trauma the day before an exam. This sort of thing is nearly always accepted, but many teachers are getting a bit sick of it. Between them, the exam boards each get over half a million appeals for special consideration every year and only 3% are rejected. With one child in six being given extra time, separate rooms, laptops and so on during GCSEs; it is starting to be plain that this is becoming another tactic by parents to boost their kids’ grades at GCSE from B to A or from A to A*.
I am not of course saying that there is no such thing as dyslexia. Nor am I objecting to children with special educational needs being granted extra help. Rather, I am claiming that middle class parents are using the system to give their children an unfair advantage over the rest and that attempts are now being made to discourage the practice. One of these is to be a bit stricter about which children genuinely have a disability.
I am afraid that home educating parents are famous for wanting special provision for their children. There are a number of possible explanations for this. One is that many home educated children have been withdrawn from school precisely because they had special needs that the school was unable to cater for. Another might be because the parents are predominantly middle class and are therefore using the same scam as many other middle class parents. It may also be the case that they are so used to having their own way and believing their child to be special, that they want different treatment as a matter of course.
Whatever the explanation, and it could well be a mixture of all of the above, it makes fixing up GCSEs for home educators something of a nightmare and is one reason why many places give them a wide berth. In my next piece, I shall look at a few other reasons why so few people seem to want to help home educators to enter their children for exams.
Sunday, July 8, 2012
The Education Committee considers support for home educators
As most readers will be aware, the Education Committee, a select committee, has launched an enquiry into the support available for home education in this country. It seems to me inevitable that this enquiry will lead eventually to more involvement by local authorities into the lives of many home educators. One of the problems that some home educators face is that they would like their children to take GCSEs and other examinations, but lack both the expertise and money to arrange them. It is manifestly unjust that a home educated child whose parents have perhaps been paying taxes for years should have to pay again to access GCSEs. It is also to the benefit of society in general that more of the fifty thousand or so children currently being educated at home should gain GCSEs. This would help them to progress into further and higher education and also make them more attractive to potential employers. I have an idea that this is one area of support where the select committee might make a definite recommendation.
This is all well and good, but the implications for both those who do want their children to take exams and also those who do not, are profound. Let us look first at those parents who do wish their children to sit GCSEs. Children at school typically sit eight or ten GCSEs; obviously, if you are going to provide finance and other assistance for home educated children to sit them and the local authorities will be receiving the Age Weighted Pupil Units for each child, then some parents will want their children to sit the same number as pupils in schools. My own daughter took eight IGCSEs and if the local authority had been offering financial help, then I would have expected them to pay for those GCSEs that I wanted my child to sit. Now all this will mean spending public money. You can’t just chuck it around willy nilly and so we hit the first difficulty. How will local authorities know whether or not they are simply wasting the money by entering some child for ten GCSEs? They would be unlikely to take my word for it that my daughter knew enough about physics to get an A*; they would want to make sure that they weren’t wasting time and money arranging for her to sit physics. For all they know, she might be barely literate, the whole thing might really be a pointless enterprise for all concerned. Perhaps she should just sit one or two, in perhaps English and maths, rather than physics, chemistry, history and geography as well? Even then, if they did enter her for maths, should she be entered for foundation or higher? How can they find out what level she is at in the various subjects?
Already, before the scheme is even off the ground, testing of the academic achievements of home educated children by local authority officers has appeared. Indeed, it is an inevitable development if once you concede that the local authority will be assessing the amount of money to be spent on arranging for these children to take examinations. Still, it might be argued, this is all voluntary. Only those parents who wish their children to take GCSEs will be involved. Just because I want my daughter to sit GCSEs, that does not mean that an autonomously educating parent in the next street would have to do the same. Nobody would have to submit to this testing and all these questions. This is ingenuous. If once local authorities begin regularly testing the abilities of home educated children, it will create an entirely new situation. This testing is bound to spread to parents whom the local authority will talk into it and encourage to become involved for the sake of their children, who would do so much better if they were to have a few GCSEs.
Now as it happens, I do not think that this would be a bad thing at all. Speaking personally, I would like local authorities to ask more questions of parents and to see how their children were doing; whether they really were being provided with a suitable education and so on. I would be glad if local authority officers were to start pressing parents to think about GCSEs and doing their best to see that the children studied for and took them. Not everybody feels this way though.
The point I am making is this. What sounds like a perfectly innocuous and well-meaning idea, making it easier for those who want to enter their children for examinations, has serious implications for the future of all home educating parents. It has the potential to create conflict a few years down the line, if taking GCSEs became the aim of local authorities for home educated children in their area, rather than simply an optional service which they provided. I think that people need to think about this a little before championing one side or the other in this question. They need particularly to think carefully before expressing too vehemently these views before select committees or to local authorities.
This is all well and good, but the implications for both those who do want their children to take exams and also those who do not, are profound. Let us look first at those parents who do wish their children to sit GCSEs. Children at school typically sit eight or ten GCSEs; obviously, if you are going to provide finance and other assistance for home educated children to sit them and the local authorities will be receiving the Age Weighted Pupil Units for each child, then some parents will want their children to sit the same number as pupils in schools. My own daughter took eight IGCSEs and if the local authority had been offering financial help, then I would have expected them to pay for those GCSEs that I wanted my child to sit. Now all this will mean spending public money. You can’t just chuck it around willy nilly and so we hit the first difficulty. How will local authorities know whether or not they are simply wasting the money by entering some child for ten GCSEs? They would be unlikely to take my word for it that my daughter knew enough about physics to get an A*; they would want to make sure that they weren’t wasting time and money arranging for her to sit physics. For all they know, she might be barely literate, the whole thing might really be a pointless enterprise for all concerned. Perhaps she should just sit one or two, in perhaps English and maths, rather than physics, chemistry, history and geography as well? Even then, if they did enter her for maths, should she be entered for foundation or higher? How can they find out what level she is at in the various subjects?
Already, before the scheme is even off the ground, testing of the academic achievements of home educated children by local authority officers has appeared. Indeed, it is an inevitable development if once you concede that the local authority will be assessing the amount of money to be spent on arranging for these children to take examinations. Still, it might be argued, this is all voluntary. Only those parents who wish their children to take GCSEs will be involved. Just because I want my daughter to sit GCSEs, that does not mean that an autonomously educating parent in the next street would have to do the same. Nobody would have to submit to this testing and all these questions. This is ingenuous. If once local authorities begin regularly testing the abilities of home educated children, it will create an entirely new situation. This testing is bound to spread to parents whom the local authority will talk into it and encourage to become involved for the sake of their children, who would do so much better if they were to have a few GCSEs.
Now as it happens, I do not think that this would be a bad thing at all. Speaking personally, I would like local authorities to ask more questions of parents and to see how their children were doing; whether they really were being provided with a suitable education and so on. I would be glad if local authority officers were to start pressing parents to think about GCSEs and doing their best to see that the children studied for and took them. Not everybody feels this way though.
The point I am making is this. What sounds like a perfectly innocuous and well-meaning idea, making it easier for those who want to enter their children for examinations, has serious implications for the future of all home educating parents. It has the potential to create conflict a few years down the line, if taking GCSEs became the aim of local authorities for home educated children in their area, rather than simply an optional service which they provided. I think that people need to think about this a little before championing one side or the other in this question. They need particularly to think carefully before expressing too vehemently these views before select committees or to local authorities.
Sunday, July 1, 2012
Smoke and mirrors in school-based education
Somebody commenting here suggested yesterday that I am prone to ‘bashing autonomous education’; a preposterous notion! To even things up a bit, we shall today look at the phenomenon of parents working away hard at their children’s school education and then forgetting that they have done so. As Old Mum correctly divined, the aim of this stratagem, both for schooling and home educating parents, is to make their children look more clever than is actually the case.
We looked yesterday at a couple of home educators who made great efforts in getting their children to read or take the necessary qualifications to get a place at college and then forgot what they had done. This kind of thing is by no means exclusive to home education; although there are certainly some stunning examples in that field. As a matter of fact, most of the parents I have known who have engaged in these games have had children at school. Before we look at how this works for those who are not home educating, I want to look at the motive for these deceptions. I say deceptions, but in many of the cases which I have known, the parents had actually managed to take themselves in as well; in fact they had come to believe their own myths! I rather suspect that the parents at whom we looked yesterday fall into this category and were not setting out deliberately to deceive others.
So what is the motive behind all this? It is pretty simple. Look at my own activities. When my daughter was two and a half and reading English fluently, I decided to teach her to read Chinese. This was very successful and she was making great progress until my wife put her foot down. Now as this stands, it is not much of a story. It simply shows the child’s father in a poor light as an insanely pushy parent. Let us imagine though that I made the same claim that the parent in yesterday’s post made to a newspaper about the kid reading English. Suppose that I told people that my daughter had learned Chinese herself; just picked it up, without any help from me at the age of two. You see the difference? This is much better; I have been transformed from a pushy parent into the father of a genius. A great improvement indeed! Telling people that we as parents have done little to encourage and help our children makes their achievements look much more impressive. They become very bright kids and we can portray ourselves as laid back parents without a pushy or ambitious bone in our bodies.
In the last few years, my wife and I have seen the children of friends get places at good universities after passing tough, academic A levels with As and A*s. Every one of their parents has claimed that the children didn’t study hard or revise, as well as making out that they themselves never bothered much about their children’s education; just leaving them to it. This is simply another version of the autonomous educating gag. What is astounding is that these people seem genuinely to have forgotten all that they did to get their kids to this point. The best local school is the Davenant Foundation. To get in, you need a ten year record of church attendance. Some of these parents spent a whole decade feigning belief in the Deity in order to get their kids to this school! How’s that for dedication, ten years pretending to be religious and all for the sake of your kid’s schooling? Once there, they paid for tutors to push the children academically, shouted and argued with the children to make sure that they took the right options at GCSE and A level and arranged a hundred different leisure activities and hobbies; to all of which they drove their children. In most cases, it would have been surprising had the kid not done well at A level.
Despite all this, the parents pretend to have done little or nothing to help their children’s studies. They tell everybody that their son or daughter never did any homework, didn’t pick up a book until a week before the exam and so on. This makes their children’s A level results look all the better, which is the aim of the gambit. Returning to home educators, we saw a marvellous example of this last year when a parent whose two children are famous for being autonomously educated claimed that her daughter had passed a science GCSE with flying colours, despite never having studied the subject and just flicking through the textbook a fortnight before the examination took place!
Speaking for myself, I have not the least objection to people claiming that their children gained GCSEs or A levels without any input from them, any more than I disapprove of parents making out that their children taught themselves to read. It is human nature to wish to present both your children and yourself in the best possible light. These tactics have the dual effect of both making you look like a relaxed and confident parent, while at the same time casting your kids in the role of infant prodigies. It’s a great game to play, as long as you don’t lose your sense of humour and start getting tetchy when others take your claims with a pinch of salt.
We looked yesterday at a couple of home educators who made great efforts in getting their children to read or take the necessary qualifications to get a place at college and then forgot what they had done. This kind of thing is by no means exclusive to home education; although there are certainly some stunning examples in that field. As a matter of fact, most of the parents I have known who have engaged in these games have had children at school. Before we look at how this works for those who are not home educating, I want to look at the motive for these deceptions. I say deceptions, but in many of the cases which I have known, the parents had actually managed to take themselves in as well; in fact they had come to believe their own myths! I rather suspect that the parents at whom we looked yesterday fall into this category and were not setting out deliberately to deceive others.
So what is the motive behind all this? It is pretty simple. Look at my own activities. When my daughter was two and a half and reading English fluently, I decided to teach her to read Chinese. This was very successful and she was making great progress until my wife put her foot down. Now as this stands, it is not much of a story. It simply shows the child’s father in a poor light as an insanely pushy parent. Let us imagine though that I made the same claim that the parent in yesterday’s post made to a newspaper about the kid reading English. Suppose that I told people that my daughter had learned Chinese herself; just picked it up, without any help from me at the age of two. You see the difference? This is much better; I have been transformed from a pushy parent into the father of a genius. A great improvement indeed! Telling people that we as parents have done little to encourage and help our children makes their achievements look much more impressive. They become very bright kids and we can portray ourselves as laid back parents without a pushy or ambitious bone in our bodies.
In the last few years, my wife and I have seen the children of friends get places at good universities after passing tough, academic A levels with As and A*s. Every one of their parents has claimed that the children didn’t study hard or revise, as well as making out that they themselves never bothered much about their children’s education; just leaving them to it. This is simply another version of the autonomous educating gag. What is astounding is that these people seem genuinely to have forgotten all that they did to get their kids to this point. The best local school is the Davenant Foundation. To get in, you need a ten year record of church attendance. Some of these parents spent a whole decade feigning belief in the Deity in order to get their kids to this school! How’s that for dedication, ten years pretending to be religious and all for the sake of your kid’s schooling? Once there, they paid for tutors to push the children academically, shouted and argued with the children to make sure that they took the right options at GCSE and A level and arranged a hundred different leisure activities and hobbies; to all of which they drove their children. In most cases, it would have been surprising had the kid not done well at A level.
Despite all this, the parents pretend to have done little or nothing to help their children’s studies. They tell everybody that their son or daughter never did any homework, didn’t pick up a book until a week before the exam and so on. This makes their children’s A level results look all the better, which is the aim of the gambit. Returning to home educators, we saw a marvellous example of this last year when a parent whose two children are famous for being autonomously educated claimed that her daughter had passed a science GCSE with flying colours, despite never having studied the subject and just flicking through the textbook a fortnight before the examination took place!
Speaking for myself, I have not the least objection to people claiming that their children gained GCSEs or A levels without any input from them, any more than I disapprove of parents making out that their children taught themselves to read. It is human nature to wish to present both your children and yourself in the best possible light. These tactics have the dual effect of both making you look like a relaxed and confident parent, while at the same time casting your kids in the role of infant prodigies. It’s a great game to play, as long as you don’t lose your sense of humour and start getting tetchy when others take your claims with a pinch of salt.
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