Ostensible and real motives for home educating

Something which I have begun to suspect in recent years is that those who choose not to send their children to school are generally  motivated by something a little deeper than the reasons which they give to others. This is certainly the case with me and also with many of the home educating parents who open up about their past lives.

I was looking again at the blog written by the mother who left this country to avoid trouble with social services about her children’s welfare. One entry is written in the third person about a child who, I gather from the comments, is actually her. She says:



Once upon a time there was a 6 year old school-girl...
She was skinny & freckly & a little bit plain & awkward.
She hated school & had few friends. She was always much happier at home.
Sometimes she would be picked on by the other pupils for not being 'typical' or conforming to the 'norms'...



One of those commenting on this, also a well-known British home educator, says,



That could have been me, although they did not know I was bright they criticised all the time and I got two years of the bitchiest teacher going, she picked on and exposed the shy ones



Now neither of these two women have said in the past that they decided to home educate their children because they were themselves unhappy at school. In fact I have never seen or heard of such a claim anyway being made by a home educating parent. It is just that when we do hear home educators mentioning their childhood experiences of school, certain patterns seem to emerge. Typically, these include being unhappy at school, having few friends, being isolated and teachers who fail to recognise genius or at the very least talent and high ability. I am not about to name names, but this constellation of life events has been observed in very many high profile home educators, as well as an awful lot of others.

It is fascinating to relate this to my own experiences and apparent motives for home educating. Now I have often said that I was motivated by the realisation that I could give my child a far better individualised education than she would receive at school. I have also said that I believed that God has given us a duty to direct our children’s upbringing and education. Both of these motives are perfectly true, but they are in a sense ’cover stories’. The fact is that I hated school and did not feel inclined to inflict upon my own daughter something which I found so loathsome and distressing. I have noticed just this same phenomenon in so many other parents. You learn that they took their kid out of school because she was being bullied or had some obscure special educational need that was not being effectively catered for. Then, some time later, it comes to light that the parent herself hated school and was very unhappy there.

The truth of the matter is, I think, that so ingrained in our culture is sending your children off to school, that it takes a little more than a calm and balanced decision to break with the tradition of schooling and decide to go it alone. Very many children are bullied, many are on the autistic spectrum or have school phobia; very few of the parents of these children take the step of removing their child from school entirely as a remedy for the problem. It takes something a little extra to prompt such an eccentric move and this is often provided by the flashbacks suffered by the parent about her own school days.

I would be interested to hear what readers think about this. How many thoroughly enjoyed their time at school and who was unhappy; did anybody feel that her ability was overlooked by the teachers? I am not, as I say, going to give names, but I have collected a huge number of personal reminiscences from different sources which cover practically every well-known home educator or researcher of whom most of us have ever heard. All tend in this   same direction.

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.