Report on Home Education in Kirklees

Research Report on Home Education in Kirklees - Dr Tiny Arora – University of Sheffield

______

University of Sheffield

School of Education

Research Report

on

Home Education in Kirklees

By Dr Tiny Arora

November 2002

Acknowledgements

This research was made possible through the co-operation of families using home education in Kirklees. This included the children, their parents or carers, and often their siblings as well. I am very grateful for their help.

I also wish to thank parents attending the Education Otherwise meetings in Huddersfield for their advice and Carol Watsham and John Craig, from the Pupil Support Service, for allowing me access to the database and alerting me to relevant issues.

About the author

Tiny Arora works as a Senior Educational Psychologist for Kirklees Metropolitan Council. She is on a (half-time) permanent secondment to SheffieldUniversity, where she is involved in the training and doctoral programme for Educational Psychologists, as well as research activities. Her research interests are in the area of parents as educators for their children (e.g. Portage and Paired Reading), school bullying and friendships. These themes led to her current interest in home education.

Abstract

Home Education is increasing at a rapid pace, both in the UK and abroad. Almost all literature on Home Education is based on samples that have been self-selected, thereby running the risk of presenting a skewed picture of the experiences and backgrounds of families in those circumstances. This study attempted to get a fuller picture by drawing on all the families who had started Home Education by 1999 in one LEA and were still doing so in June/July 2001 in the same LEA. Interviews took place in June-September 2001 with 12 out of the 14 families who met that criterion. Further details about a wider group of families came from the LEA’s database. The study showed that the majority of young people (about two-thirds) returned to school within a short period of having started home education. For those families who had been home educating for more than 2 years, the study indicated: A wide variety of home circumstances and cultural backgrounds; a wide variety of reasons for Home Education, often related to the parents’ perception that schooling was not able to cater for their child’s special educational needs or that their child was disaffected with school; all the young people appeared to be happy and many of them had active social lives; many families would ideally like their children to return to school, but cannot see any clear way of achieving this; education is highly valued by all parents and children.

Different types of support are needed for the families at four different stages of the home tuition: before making the final decision; just after the decision has been made; once the family has settled into their routine; and (where appropriate) at the point at which families start to consider a return to school for their child.

The researcher suggests that funding for part of this support could be made available if home educated children remained on the roll of their schools, as part of a partnership in education between home and school.

1.Introduction

This report describes the background to home education as reported in the literature, noting the legal background, the rapid growth in this area and the monitoring role of the Local Education Authority (LEA). Reasons mentioned in the literature for home education and outcomes for the children involved are described. The difficulties of not having representative samples are outlined. It then goes on to report on the situation in Kirklees, drawing first on a survey of all parents (n=65) who started home education since May 1998. This is followed by an analysis of in depth interviews, held in July/August 2001, with 12 out of the 14 families (representing 17 children) who at that time had been using home education for 18 months or longer.

N.B. Children’s names have been changed in order to preserve anonymity.

2.Aims of research

The survey sought to find out the reasons why parents choose home education in Kirklees, to collect simple demographical details and to establish the age of the young person when the family first started home education.

The interviews set out to establish the process by which the parents had decided on home education, what support they would have liked at the time and the support they felt they needed now. It also enquired about the arrangements parents had made for home education and ways in which they described the teaching and learning process taking place.

3.Background to Home Education

3.1Difference with other groups who do not receive education at school

There are various categories of young people who are not immediately 'visible' within the education system. They are either not educated regularly in schools or do not receive education in school at all. They include young people who truant, who are ill, whose families are travelling, who are excluded from school, who are anxious non-attenders, some pregnant school girls, as well as the group of young people with whom this article is concerned. The way in which this last group differs from the former ones is that the State is no longer providing their education, which is solely undertaken by their parents.

3.2The legal background

Under section 7 of the 1996 Education Act (previously section 36 of the 1944 Education Act) parents have a duty to ensure that their school-aged child receives 'efficient full-time education, suitable to his age, aptitude and ability, and to any special educational needs that he may have, either by regular attendance at school or otherwise'. They can therefore choose to educate their children themselves. As Meighan (1995) puts it, 'the law is clear: education is compulsory, schooling is not'. The term ‘suitable education’ has been interpreted by the court as one which prepares children for life in modern civilised society and enables them to achieve their full potential. To base the legal meaning of ‘full-time’ on school hours is not considered relevant to home education, which generally takes place on a one-to-one basis or in very small groups, in very different conditions.

The Local Education Authority (LEA) only has a monitoring function in respect of such young people, although the majority also see themselves as giving advice. The way these functions are carried out can vary considerably between similar LEAs (Bates 1996). LEAs do not have automatic right of access to the parents’ home. All parents need to do is to demonstrate that they are providing a suitable full-time education, when the LEA requests this.

Parents are not obliged to place themselves on the LEA list. If their child is on the roll of a school, all they need to do is to inform the Headteacher. If their child has not been on the roll of a school in that LEA because they were pre-school or have moved in from another LEA, they are not obliged to tell anyone. This makes it very difficult for LEAs to keep precise records of their home educating families.

3.3Growing numbers in the UK and worldwide.

There is an increasing number of parents who are choosing to educate their children at home. This trend is not only found in the UK but also in the rest of the world, so that it is now a substantial minority in some countries. The Home School Legal Defense Association (HDLA, 1997) reported that in the USA, 900,000 young people were schooled at home, which is a threefold increase since 1990 and represents nearly 2% of the total school-age population. In 2000, this had risen to 1.7 million or 3% (Rhodes, 2000).

Bates’ (1996) figures, based on returns from LEAs, suggested that in England, in 1996, there were 3,602 families who home educated 4,768 children. This last number is likely to be an underestimate because of the above mentioned factors in collecting precise information.

Meighan (1997), who has done much in the UK to create awareness of home education, suggested that the number of young people receiving home-based education in the UK in 1997 was approaching 50,000. More recent quotes are around a figure of 150,000 or 1.5% of the UK school-aged population (The Guardian, 2000; Home Education UK, 2001), with predictions that the number will continue to rise dramatically.

3.4Two different groups

Some families never send their children to school, others withdraw their children after they have attended school. The former group usually does this in connection with moral, religious or ideological convictions. The latter group usually choose home education because they perceive specific problems for their children in school: unsatisfactory progress, bullying, learning difficulties and disruptive behaviour (Thomas 1998). Thomas’ sample and other literature suggest that these groups are about 50/50 in proportion.

3.5Psychological and social well-being and educational achievement

Research studies generally indicate that home educated children are more well-adjusted (Shyers, 1992), have a higher self-esteem (Scheffer, 1995), are more confident and achieve more highly (Ray, 1991; Webb, 1990) than their counterparts who attend school. These findings are not surprising if the background of their parents is taken into account. Surveys in the UK and USA suggest that the parents have, on average, greater formal education and a higher family income than average. These parents tend to live in two-parent families and are highly motivated for their children to succeed (Mayberry et al, 1995). Many of them (25-50%) are teachers or teacher trained (Meighan, 1997). Such factors are frequently correlated with high achievement.

3.6 Critique of previous research

One of the greatest problems in conducting research in this area is to obtain a representative sample of home educating families. The above quoted studies are affected by this. Typically, data have been gathered through postal questionnaires, with the usual low response rate pertaining in such surveys, or from families who volunteered to be interviewed. For both sources, such families are usually found through a formal organisation, such as Education Otherwise (Thomas, 1998). The respondents are therefore likely to be the more highly motivated and better educated of the entire group of home-educating parents, and their children are likely to benefit from such advantages.

What we need to find out is whether the characteristics of the parents and children as described in the earlier sections are representative of all families engaged in home education. There may be other families, who did not respond to large surveys and who are not members of home education organizations, who have entirely different characteristics.

4.THE SITUATION IN KIRKLEES

4.1Monitoring and data collection in Kirklees

Kirklees keeps a data base of school-aged children whose parents have decided to home educate. When a family informs the LEA that they have decided to home educate, an Education Social Worker completes a questionnaire with them, which collects demographical details and asks them about their reasons for doing so. A teacher from the Pupil Support Service is designated to contact the family on an annual basis, in order to monitor the situation.

4.2Growth of Home Education in Kirklees

In Kirklees, the number of children registered as receiving home education trebled from 1995 to 1996, then doubled again by 1997, to 67. Since then, the number of registered children receiving home education at any one time has stayed approximately at this level. If we extrapolate the estimate of 1.5% of the total school-aged population (see above) to school-aged children in Kirklees, then there could be potentially about 900 children receiving home education in this area. That figure appears to be a gross overestimate, but the Education Social Worker suspects that there are indeed many families who choose never to enrol their children at school. Further support for this comes the findings of Rothermel (personal communication). About 40% of those responding to her UK questionnaire in 1999 about home education (n = approx. 1000) said that they were not on their LEA’s register.

5.DESCRIPTION OF THE PRESENT RESEARCH

The present report will address the following issues in relation to home education in Kirklees:

1. What are the demographical details of home educating parents?
2. At what age do the children start home education?
3. What are the reasons for families deciding on home education?
4. What are the arrangements for home education?
5. Do some children return to school?
6. What support would home educating parents find useful and effective?

These issues arose from the review of the literature on this topic, from discussions with Kirklees officers concerned with home education and with parents belonging to the local Education Otherwise group.

The data needed to answer these questions were gathered in the following ways:

• From the database held by the Education Access Service (gathered through a questionnaire by the ESW on her first contact with the families)
• From interviews held in July and August 2001 with families who had continued home education for their children for more than 18 months.

With both ways of data gathering the main purpose was to collect as comprehensive a sample as possible. For the questionnaire, this would mean that there would be data from all families (n=65) who had started home education since May 1998 (the time when the questionnaire was first introduced. For different parts of the questionnaire there were data missing from some families, so that the total data available were between 70 - 80% of the possible total. For the interviews, all the 14 families meeting the criteria in July 2001 were contacted . Only two families refused to co-operate. This meant that the sample interviewed was 85% of the possible total and comprised 12 families with 17 children of compulsory school age who were home educated.

It will be clear from the above that this research was able to collect data from a much higher proportion of the target population than previous research in this area. However, the number of interviewed families was relatively small, so that any generalisation of results should be treated with caution.

1. FINDINGS

6.1.Withdrawing and returning to school

Very few families in Kirklees opt for their children being home educated without having had some time in school. Fig. 1 shows the data that were available in April 2000, for 36 children who had been placed on the register since May 1998. Only a few children were registered as having home education by the time they were 7 years old and none had been registered at an earlier age over the past two years. This does not mean that no such children existed. Amongst the families that were interviewed and who had more than one child being home educated, there were two in which there were younger children who had never been to school. They had decided to take this step as a result of their successful experiences with their older children.

The families fell into two different groups on the basis of the length of time committed to home education. By far the largest group (n=41) consisted of those who re-enrolled their children into school soon after withdrawal. The second group (n=14) comprised those who had continued home education for more than 18 months. These were the families who were interviewed. The latter group was by no means homogeneous in their desire to continue home education. There were at least two families who were seriously considering ways in which their child could return to school.

It would seem that within Kirklees, there is a strong tendency for re-enrolment into school amongst the majority of parents who have opted for home education. What the reasons are for this is not clear at present, as these families were not part of the interviewed sample.

There was a small number of families (n=9) who had moved from their initial address, whose present address was unknown and whose children had not returned to school in Kirklees. These children were ‘lost from the system’.

Fig. 1 Age of children when first placed on register (April 2000, n = 36)

6.2Demographical details of the samples

Tables 1 and 2 show the ethnicity distribution of children who were educated at home in Kirklees since May 1998. The distribution reflects the ethnicity found in Kirklees generally. For the interviewed sample, the number of South Asian (Gujerati) children in the sample is of a higher proportion than that found in the whole of Kirklees.

Table 1 Ethnicity of children who have started home education since May 1998 (n=65).

number / %
White UK/Irish / 41 / 63
South Asian Pakistani / 9 / 14
Mixed race Asian / 2 / 3
Mixed race Afro-Caribbean / 1 / 1.5
South Asian Bangladeshi / 1 / 1.5
White European / 1 / 1.5
Black African / 1 / 1.5
Black Caribbean / 1 / 1.5
Missing data / 8 / 12.5

Total 65 100