Most home educating parents are normal...

I was asked recently to post about the fact that the vast majority of home educating parents in this country are perfectly normal men and women who want only to provide the best possible education for their children. I am happy to do so, because of course this is perfectly true. Unfortunately, the small percentage of strange and sometimes downright loopy individuals scattered among the normal and well-balanced home educators have an influence out of all proportion to their numbers. Many of these weirder types spend hours on the internet connecting with other odd people and, encouraged by a handful of high profile figures, they buy into a fantasy world of conspiracy and persecution. It goes without saying that this is not only the case with home education! That’s just what the internet is like. I am not bothered in general if a group of rock fans wish to get together and exchange mad theories about dead singers or if steam train enthusiasts want to accuse each other of heresy; these are harmless enough matters. I am concerned though when it is happening with home education, because I care about home education and worked for many years with vulnerable children. This is something about which I feel strongly.


Those relatively small number of home educating parents who sit up until four or five in the morning communicating with other like-minded nuts, often become vociferous members or founders of home educating support groups. They pick up a lot of nonsense from the internet and then become evangelical about spreading the news and explaining to other parents why they should not accept visits from their local authority or teach their children to read. Yes, really. I had an email from a mother at a home educating group who was secretly teaching her child to read, because she was too embarrassed to let anybody at her local group know about it. They was a strong ethos there about the virtues of the spontaneous acquisition of literacy and anybody who actually taught their child was regarded as a pushy parent. Imagine that; a home educating support group where parents were made to feel uneasy and ashamed about educating their children!

At another group, two of the main members were bitterly opposed to the MMR vaccine. Again, this was largely as a result of hanging round crank sites on the net. One of them had a child on the autistic spectrum and was so anti-MMR that one of the other parents felt that she had to keep secret the fact that she had had her own child vaccinated. In other groups dominated by people whom one could describe as disciples of various home educating gurus, parents allowed visits from their local authority, but kept that secret as well, for fear of being ostracised.

So, yes it is absolutely true that the overwhelming majority of home educating parents in this country are normal people who are interested only in educating their children. But that small number who are a bit mad have quite an influence and because they are so vociferous, they manage to dominate many groups, forums and lists. It is this which worries me.

More about the monitoring of home education

When I wrote recently on this topic, I was surprised to find that there was broad agreement about many points. Here are a few more points with which few home educators will disagree. First, there will always be cases of cruel or abusive people mistreating or even murdering their children. Most of these children are at school and a few are home educated. Such abusers can be very cunning and a brief visit once a year will almost certainly miss some of these wicked parents.


A second point is that annual visits for every home educating family is an expensive and not particularly effective way of keeping an eye on the situation. To give an example, one need only look at my own case. Essex County Council chose to involve themselves and start visiting our home when my daughter was eight. We live in Loughton and their office is in Colchester. Each visit entailed a seventy mile round trip for the woman. By the time my daughter was thirteen and taking IGCSEs, it was clear to both us and the local authority that such visits were a waste of their time and ours. There are many similar cases. This sort of thing is not a good use of resources.

On the other hand, I do not believe that we should just assume that every parent is capable of undertaking this civic duty. Just as somebody who volunteers to undertake the duty of policing, as special constables do, is required first to demonstrate his or her fitness to undertake the task; so to with those who would educate a child. The easiest way to assess the suitability for exercising this duty is for somebody from the local authority to make an initial visit to the home and speak to both the parent and child. In this way, I would guess that a chat and a look around the home would make it clear that a large proportion of those parents were quite capable of taking on this duty. The remaining people, I am thinking a ballpark figure of perhaps 10% to 20% could be offered the choice of continuing to home educate with some involvement and monitoring by the local authority or, if they declined, a School Attendance Order would be issued.

Of course, such a rough and ready method would result in some unfit parents being overlooked and other perfectly capable parents being offered closer supervision. On the whole though, I think that this would work better than the current system, where some parents are never seen at all. The beauty of a system like this is that it would require no new legislation. All that would be necessary would be for local authorities to tell parents that they could not be convinced that a suitable education was taking place without visiting their home. Of course, parents have no duty in law to comply with this and those that refused would automatically be issued with a School Attendance Order.

I have an idea that a system of this sort would sift out quite a few parents who are not really educating their children, while leaving the 80% or so who are to get on with the job without any interference. For those who doubt that it would be possible to judge in the course of a two hour or so visit, which parents and homes were suitable for the education of a child; there are various strong indicators. The presence of many books is one. A home with no books on display is almost certainly a home where parents are not valuing learning and education. This would be easily spotted within the first few minutes of a visit.