Can we please raise the standard of debate around home education?

Last week The Times published an opinion piece by Emma Duncan, a former deputy editor at The Economist. When I tried to complain to my husband about what Emma had written, he exclaimed “I love Emma Duncan!”, so I’m prepared to accept that she may have some valuable ideas, even if Henry picked the wrong moment to share his enthusiasm for them.

But Emma’s piece about homeschooling (her word—in the UK the legal term is home education) fell far below the standards expected from The Times. This is no surprise because pretty much all commentary about home education is of a similarly low standard. I am open to the idea that we need a debate about home education in the UK, but the reason parents often bristle whenever the subject is raised is that the tone of the debate is generally offensive, alarming, and woefully ill-informed.

Emma’s piece, in the first instance, is simply incorrect:

You can quite legally have a child, or enter the country with one, and never send it to school. You can remove it from school and if you say you’re home schooling, nobody checks up on you.

It is true that you can legally never send your child to school. The caveat is that you are legally required to provide them with a suitable education. As the charity Education Otherwise puts it, school is optional, education is not.

But it is completely false to say that if you say you’re home schooling, nobody checks up on you. Local authorities are legally required to ascertain whether a child is receiving a suitable education and a School Attendance Order can be issued by the local council to compel you to send your child to school if they do not find you are doing the job properly yourself. For most families, this oversight means writing an annual report on the child’s learning, and the LA can follow up with requests for further information if required. You are currently not obliged to send examples of the child’s work, or agree to meet the local authority representative in person. Does Emma Duncan think this is acceptable? I have no idea, she doesn’t mention it.

Then Emma includes two paragraphs about how home educators are admirable, tailoring their child’s education to the child’s needs, interests, and abilities often at significant personal, professional, and financial sacrifice. This isn’t mentioned much in the public discourse, and I started to nod my head as I read.

But then Emma brings up Sara Sharif. At the risk of repeating myself, Sara was well-known to local authorities. In fact Social Services were aware of her parents even before Sara was born. There were 15 separate occasions when Social Services were made aware that Sara was potentially in danger. Sara was being abused during her time at school. Her teachers must have been desperate, and did what they could. But the idea that the move to home education was the turning point in Sara’s life is a wilful misreading of the facts.

Emma says that homeschooling is ‘enthusiastically espoused by the far-right’. But just because the far-right likes homeschooling, doesn’t mean homeschoolers like the far-right. Elsewhere in the post Emma notes that in Germany homeschooling is effectively illegal. Has she seen Germany’s recent political developments? In the UK, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party are currently level in the polls with the Tories and Labour—a development caused by large numbers of school-educated adults now turning away from the mainstream parties. School education does not, sadly, appear to be any kind of bulwark against far-right thinking.

Then on, predictably enough, to antivaxxers. Apparently antivax beliefs are common among homeschoolers. How we know that, I do not know—the usual lament is that we have no data about home educators, let alone their feelings about vaccination. However, the figures for low vaccination take-up dwarf the figures for home education. Nearly 15% of two year olds in the UK have not had the standard suite of vaccinations (the WHO recommends vaccine take-up rates of 95%+) By Emma’s own admission, home educators make up 1-2% of families. So even if home educators are disproportionately antivaxxers, so are a significant number of families with children in mainstream education. And personally, I do not think that this kind of lazy derision (of both homeschoolers and antivaxxers) is a good way to ameliorate the high levels of vaccine hesitancy.

Emma cites Wakefield Council in blaming rising anxiety for children increasingly pulled out of school. This is a serious area of concern. Many parents today never intended to educate their child at home but find themselves forced to because the child is no longer capable of attending school. Reading about these cases is desperately sad. Many of the children are in a terrible state, and need much time and expertise to heal. Emma blithely asserts that ‘children need to learn how to cope with institutions and crowds. School is partly about learning how to deal with the situations into which adult life throws you.’

But this does nothing to seek to understand why children are so anxious and so unwilling—or unable—to go to school. The use of isolation rooms in school, for example, is not designed to help children cope with institutions or deal with the situations into which adult life throws you. The only other place I can think of with a similar set-up is a police station. I spoke to one mother whose child had taken to sitting under the table in the classroom, which his teacher identified as odd behaviour. Not so odd when the mother found out he was doing it to protect himself from the chairs that were routinely thrown around the classroom. Rising anxiety and shocking behaviour are complex issues that deserve serious attention. To say that anxious parents and children simply need to buck up and get on with it avoids any scrutiny of the schools themselves.

Emma is making a stronger point when she argues that the right of a child to a decent education may be at odds with the right of a parent to bring their child up as they see fit. This is a meaty and important question which has been far too little discussed. But she immediately moves onto socialisation and the need for people to get along together. I won’t rehash the socialisation arguments here, but why is there this persistent belief that home educated children are unsocialised while their school peers are models affability? Where I live, the police regularly gather in the local shopping centre on weekday afternoons because that’s where the school kids hang out after school. Yes, home educators have to work harder to create opportunities for friendships to blossom. But the idea that home ed children are deficient in something that school kids have in abundance is nonsense.

Emma finishes strongly:

I reckon we’d do best to ban it. Short of that, the government should require Ofsted or local authorities to enter the premises, monitor the education that home-schooled children are getting and test them to see if they’re learning anything.

This is exactly the kind of knee-jerk reaction that home educators despair of. Ban it, or send an army of inspectors into our homes to quiz our children. No matter that there is no agreed curriculum to test them on, or that with over 100,000 home ed families this is a completely unfeasible suggestion, or that there might be huge legal objections to education officers able to ‘enter the premises’ (a phrase surely calculated to bring to mind police activity, as if home education and criminal behaviour are somehow linked).

Emma says that allowing parents to teach their children ‘whatever mad stuff they choose’ isn’t acceptable. I have to agree with her, especially when children aren’t exposed to alternative viewpoints at school. But this offensive opinion piece does nothing to get the home educators who probably agree with her position on side. It offers nothing in the way of serious, actionable solutions, and offers barely a token acknowledgement of the huge good that can come from parents who take their responsibilities towards their children so seriously that they upend their lives in their efforts to get it right.

The rise in home education in the UK is not necessarily cause for concern, but it should give us pause for thought. Anyone reading this post would agree that children deserve the best education we can give them.

How can we ensure that happens? How we can support parents and children without writing them off as crazy or neo-Nazi, and without hugely overstepping the reasonable incursion of the state into family life? How can we harness the huge potential benefit that comes from parents willing to encourage their children to follow their passions regardless of age or the government’s expectations of what a child is capable of?

I don’t know, and I don’t think Emma Duncan does either. But I think it matters, and we need serious, thoughtful debate about it. Emma’s article, sadly, doesn’t meet the mark.

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