The Underhill Journal

Schools blamed as education at home shows dramatic increase
By Ian Herbert
Published: 29 September 2007

The number of parents home schooling their children has increased by at least 800 per cent within five years in some parts of Britain, as growing evidence emerges that some schools have encouraged it as a way of improving league table ratings for truancy and educational performance

The highest increase in Britain has been recorded in Lancashire, where 567 children are now home schooled compared with 61 five years ago.

Leicestershire's increase is 420 per cent and Cardiff's 221 per cent, though Education Otherwise – an organisation which offers advice to parents wanting to educate their children at home – claims the numbers may be three times higher than those disclosed by local authorities, because some children never start school in the first place and are not on local authority records.

Chris Meldrum, head teacher of the City of Preston School in Lancashire told Channel 4 News this week that he believed home schooling had been encouraged in some places because of the benefit to the institution's performance.

"I'm assuming that [headteachers] are saying 'I've got targets to meet [so]... why don't we look at this [homeschooling] loophole and sign them off," he said.

A total of 30 children were "signed off" in 12 months at his school, which is currently in special measures, though Mr Meldrum has discouraged the practice since his arrival.

B ut some parents do not need encouragement. Stewart and Rebecca Eyres, a university lecturer and librarian from Kirkham, near Preston, felt that school would "institutionalise" their daughters Jane, eight, and Amy, six, and not provide the personalised learning that is one of the Government's aspirations.

The Eyres' homeschooling system is not highly structured. It may typically begin with Mr Eyres deliberately leaving a newspaper around and hoping his daughters will be drawn to an image or headline that might form the basis of a discussion. As a mathematics graduate he can help Jane with the subject while reading sessions develop from the books the children are interested in. The girls have music and French lessons with local tutors and other children.

"We look at what our friends' children are doing in school and benchmark as we go along," said Mr Eyres.

"We could see the girls getting on acceptably at school but we felt our eldest would not cope with the strictures it presented and our other daughter would go along with everything and become a bit of a couch potato in class. It's a confidence thing. Working in the education system has given my wife and I the confidence to do this."

Anecdotal evidence suggests other parents are keeping their children at home because their offspring have special educational needs while others object to the testing which they feel dominates school.

Others choose the route because of bullying and some simply find it the best way to avoid prosecution for truanting. The point at which children are due to step up to secondary school often triggers a decision to remove a child.

Some local authorities have dedicated home school liaison officers but LEAs can only intervene if there is evidence that a child's education is inadequate.

Education welfare officers are concerned that there is no identifiable standard or benchmarking for the hundreds of children who do not attend school. Critics of the practice also suggest that it affects children's ability to socialise. But Mr Eyres insists that theory is flawed.

"I simply don't rate the social side of school and in my experience that was not what school was about," he said. "The girls have many firm friends outside school, made at dancing and Rainbows (the Guiding organisation for under-sevens) and continue to make more."

Judging from things like the Home Education mailing list I am a member of, there has also been a recent, large increase in the number of Scottish parents choosing to Home Educate. I put this done to the increasingly robotic nature of education in Schools. There is far to much emphasis on individual Schools performance in tests and meeting targets and far too little on meeting the individual needs of the children in the classroom.
Parents are increasingly the target of attack from teaching associations, blaming them for the breakdown in classroom behaviour and Teacher-Pupil relations seen in recent years, and there are quite a number of caring, intelligent and rational parents who resent this. Our children are often the targets of bullies that the education system is clearly failing and in our experience it is often a failure of the teaching staff to address these problems that lead to them escalating beyond any adult control. In their desperate rush not to be seen as glorified babysitters they are abdicating all responsibility for the children in their care to the Parents and failing to engage the children in a constructive manner that will help to improve their relations with their pupils.
As far as I can tell, it is in a parents nature to teach their child. Countless scientific studies have proved the importance of a child's interaction with it's parents in helping a child achieve academic excellence. It is a given fact that children from middle class, educationally minded homes do better academically than those from more educationally impoverished backgrounds. It has also been proven that Home Educated children from poor families attain higher standards of literacy and numeracy than their state educated counterparts. Why is it that someone who has been to a university - a notoriously child free environment - and studied Teaching for a couple of years is considered a better judge of my child than I who have known him for his entire life? Why are they better at teaching him when I have already taught him the hardest subjects by far, those of walking, talking, social interaction and all those other crucial things without which our child can get utterly nowhere in life?
Anyway, while the situation in Schools remains as it currently is, the number of children being removed from school and taught at home will continue to increase.