Home Schooling - are you for or against?

Ellianne - Ofsted inspections are hated because they are data-based. They will tell you there is more to it than that, but the truth is that you need to have the "right" data to wave under the inspector's nose. As to the happy pupils, the extensive extra-curricular activities, the breadth of the curriculum that expands from the government-dictated shackles - none of this matters as long as the data pass muster.

The data can pass muster if we can prove that 8 year olds can identify a "fronted adverbial" - what nonsense.

If you ask the parents of the children at the school where I am governor why they send them there, they will not even mention data. A school can go down an Ofsted grade for poor attendance - in a tiny rural school where a bug did the rounds and laid them all flat for weeks, resulting in the attendance data going down - apparently we should have waved a magic wand and told the bug to go away!

There's an awful lot to discuss here but I'll add my experience. I have a DS who was out of school after the age of 13. He was a "disruptive" bright child in a very good school, severely dyslexic with a sense of humour that upset many. He has gone on to achieve and has an MA. So it is possible to achieve academic qualifications without the GCSE, A level route. Mind I think my home schooling was mostly about allowing him to explore the things he was interested in and trying to find resources and places that supported him.

The issue of how much time is spent teaching in schools is so different. I did supply in primary schools for a long time. There were schools I could walk in, know I would have a lesson plan left, and the class would just get on with the work. There were others where if I could just stay through the day, keep the children reasonably under control and not running riot, I was regarded as successful, getting work out of them was a welcome bonus. The complete disparity between schools working in innercity areas and those in middle class suburbs is extraordinary. In deprived areas staff cope well with real problems and problem children and I learned some of my best coping strategies from those people who tried desperately to keep children who were disruptive in school.

This disparity only deepens in secondary schools, where staff have another problem, maintaining the school's achievement levels and keeping the cleverest on track. Not surprisingly exclusion is a sort of solution. The situation is getting worse as most schools are now cutting the support staff who were there to keep children in school.

So I think there are children who could be better out of school and may do very well being home schooled. That might be very different if schools were properly funded and education was returned to a situation where we stopped counting bits of paper as a mark of educational success and started looking at the child's needs first.

I am not a teacher but I have worked in a lot of schools and early years settings as an outsider. Obviously I only have seen a sample of schools across the country but I think the difference between good and outstanding is often highly debatable and has often caused me to raise my eyebrow so to speak. On the other hand I have never been in a setting that has received a grading of below good that has caused me any surprise.
I worked as a manager in social care and whilst inspections are by their nature stressful I had only good experience with regard to my relationships with inspectors.

Why is it Ofsted inspections are so feared, dreaded and hated? What are they doing wrong?
My husband is an inspector and enters schools with the premise that the inspectors are there to advise and to sometimes suggest changes for the better.

growstuff

I think parents and Ofsted should stop being obsessed by outstanding exam results. TBH, they're not difficult to manipulate, especially with bright children and supportive parents. SN classes are often well-managed too.

I think Ofsted should concentrate on the middles sets. They should speak to the pupils themselves and ask them about their experiences. Ask them whether they can get on with with whatever they want to achieve and whether they feel they're doing what they could and whether they're satisfied that they're not being disrupted or bullied. I wouldn't mind betting that a different picture would emerge of schools, even some which are considered outstanding.

Slightly off at a tangent but I always used to say Ofsted inspections were a waste of time, quicker to ask the students ! They knew a good teacher when they saw one ! Even if they didn’t like that teacher they would say he/she was good. BUt then I believe these inspections are just data based number crunching exercises now !

The simple fact is that there is good and bad home schooling and good and bad schools.

Iam64

Interesting isn’t it. If it had been an inner city school serving a very deprived area, maybe parents evenings would have been very different. Maybe those disruptive bright boys would have escalated in a less constrained environment and been excluded

I agree. There's a sort of critical mass, where disruption and low motivation can no longer be controlled.

I think parents and Ofsted should stop being obsessed by outstanding exam results. TBH, they're not difficult to manipulate, especially with bright children and supportive parents. SN classes are often well-managed too.

I think Ofsted should concentrate on the middles sets. They should speak to the pupils themselves and ask them about their experiences. Ask them whether they can get on with with whatever they want to achieve and whether they feel they're doing what they could and whether they're satisfied that they're not being disrupted or bullied. I wouldn't mind betting that a different picture would emerge of schools, even some which are considered outstanding.

DS was moved down a set in maths, simply because his hand writing was so poor. As we discovered later, he is dyspraxic.

Fortunately he wasn't the disruptive kind. Unfortunately he is the kind who sat quietly and disappeared into a world of his own and the world could have come to an end and he wouldn't have noticed, so as he caused no problems, teachers took no notice of him.

This is why I say, in retrospect, I wish I had home schooled him.

Interesting isn’t it. If it had been an inner city school serving a very deprived area, maybe parents evenings would have been very different. Maybe those disruptive bright boys would have escalated in a less constrained environment and been excluded

Again outstanding school with a lot of competition to secure a place.

Yes we were told that my son should work very hard to move up from set 2 (out of 4) in a particular subject so he could have less disruption.

Ellianne

^Every parent has a different idea about what schooling should be^ and in a private school they're very often on your back to produce this.

Occasionally too parents approach private schools in year 5 and 6 just to get their homeschooled kids into the best secondary schools. That is certainly not always an easy task either.

The unit where I worked had older children, but it was a similar situation. Occasionally, families had support from the local authority, but usually they were self-funded (and it wasn't cheap). I could be very non-PC and say what I thought of some of the parents, but I won't.

I agree with Gaga’ s point about middle sets that can be disrupted by bright children whose academic ability puts them in top sets but who are put into middle sets. I assume to ensure the others in the top sets get a*.
One of my children was middle set maths. The teacher told me she needed to work harder and he could move her up a set. When I told him she’d complained all lessons were disrupted by a group of boys, he acknowledged this. He turned his register round, pointed to 6 names with a * beside them. He said those boys were all capable of set 1 but placed in his set to avoid disrupting set 1 and also because they’d get a C with no effort.
This was a ‘good’ school, with Ofsted outstanding and 2nd only to our local private school for exam results

Every parent has a different idea about what schooling should be and in a private school they're very often on your back to produce this.

Occasionally too parents approach private schools in year 5 and 6 just to get their homeschooled kids into the best secondary schools. That is certainly not always an easy task either.

Ellianne It must have been something you read about. Needlework sounds very twee - my mother once told me she did it at school, but I never did (thank goodness).

nanna8

Most of the primary schools here are really good so I can’t personally understand the necessity for home schooling at that level. High schools ? are a different story. If you can afford private, well and good, but it very much depends on the area you live as to whether you get a good state school. Trouble is ,to home school at this level requires a fair bit of skill but most of the home schoolers I have come across simply don’t have it. The result is the children finish school with absolutely no recognisable qualifications. If they are lucky they will get into some sort of technical training but it is very hard to get into University from home schooling. Some do, but they seem to be very much the exception. It is too widespread here, they need to reign it in and control it more.

I can understand the desire to home-school. Every parent has a different idea about what schooling should be and every education system and society has common goals, which might not coincide with what parents want. Sometimes, the two can't be reconciled. You only have to look at anti-vaxxers to get an idea of people who don't want to conform to what the "powers that be" consider to be in the common good. The same thinking exists in education.

GagaJo I hold you entirely responsible for a disturbed night's sleep. I was teaching needlework in an old castle and the children started to run amok all through the building. Then they wanted extending dog leads in all colours and proceeded to tie each other up. Discipline went right out the window.
I can't blame you for the WW2 bomb that exploded in the playground, but I'm washed out this morning!
Never before in my years of teaching!

Iam64 I have some experience of the kind of children and families you mean. I worked for a few months in a small unit for children who wouldn't attend school. Parents had supported (often encouraged) their non-attendance and had tried to home-school, but it hadn't worked out, so they looked for something more structured, which we provided.

Most of the families had some kind of problem, not usually associated with finances, but mental health. It wasn't uncommon for the parents to have serious mental health issues themselves and to transfer the issues to their own children. Their children commonly lacked any form of resilience and being at home without any outside influence was the worst place for them. The children needed a flexible combination of individual tuition and counselling. Of course, this was expensive and funding was always an issue. The majority of such children are being home-schooled and are operating "under the radar".

The above notwithstanding, there are parents who opt to home-school their children and make an excellent job of it.

Most of the primary schools here are really good so I can’t personally understand the necessity for home schooling at that level. High schools ? are a different story. If you can afford private, well and good, but it very much depends on the area you live as to whether you get a good state school. Trouble is ,to home school at this level requires a fair bit of skill but most of the home schoolers I have come across simply don’t have it. The result is the children finish school with absolutely no recognisable qualifications. If they are lucky they will get into some sort of technical training but it is very hard to get into University from home schooling. Some do, but they seem to be very much the exception. It is too widespread here, they need to reign it in and control it more.

BTW The Daily Mail and the like would be doing everybody a favour if it stopped knocking teachers for being "lazy" and running stupid stories about school uniform. It would be doing the pupils themselves a favour, if it highlighted how unsupportive a minority of parents are and how it can be their own children who are the disruptive influence.

It's ironic that the Daily Mail runs campaigns to get all children back in schools. It seems they're more concerned about childcare issues or maybe it's because some parents can't cope with their children and are desperate to offload them on to others. The DM doesn't usually show much concern for education as an idea or mental health, so there's a decidedly hypocritical air about its stance.

Chardy Teachers do need the support of the public. I don't blame most teachers for poor behaviour. The responsibility lies with the pupils and, in some cases, parents who blame teachers for poor behaviour. I have sat in meetings and told parents that their children are disruptive and the parents themselves have just shrugged their shoulders and said they weren't good pupils themselves and have just said that their child isn't cut out for school. Some school "leaders" and others blame teachers by claiming that lessons aren't engaging enough. Sorry, but teachers aren't performing clowns and I don't remember my own teachers going out of their way to entertain me. Pupils and their own parents (and the public) have some responsibility to accept that learning can hard and sometimes boring.

Chardy Unfortunately, I don't think Gagajo is wrong. Disruptive pupils aren't confined to SN or "bottom" sets. Some subjects in some schools only have mixed ability groups anyway. It is not uncommon, for example, for MFL to be taught in mixed ability groups in KS4 because the timetable won't work any other way. Some disruptive pupils are very bright and the dilemma is whether to put them in a "top" set, where hopefully the majority will get on with their work or in a "bottom" set, which might be somewhat smaller.

I'm not going to quantify the number of hours lost through disruption because I don't know. It's anecdotal, but it's based on my own experience in two schools, where I worked for a short time (fortunately I was able to leave quite quickly), the experience of one of my own children (again I was able to find her another school) and what my tutees have told me. All of this took place in an area which wouldn't be considered deprived. I did spend most of my teaching career in schools where discipline was acceptable, but there most certainly are schools (and not just a tiny number), where the poor behaviour of a few pupils disrupts the education of many.

No Chardy, they are NOT always in bottom class small groups. Children with poor behaviour aren't necessary low ability. That is such an educational basic. I taught a class like this a year ago. ALL lovely children BUT there were a core 6 or 7 in there that were in and out of school due to ongoing behaviour issues. Socially disadvantaged. After I left, one of them was permanently excluded. She was also a nice child, BUT had serious social and emotional issues. She also happened to have been quite capable of GCSE 7s & 8s.

As I am sure you are only too aware, if you are as experienced as you say, all of her data supported her to be a top set student, but due to her poor attendance and suspensions, she was in a middle set. The other students with behaviour problems didn't help either.

And this was not a problem class. There were many in that (quite nice but massively underfunded) school who were a lot worse.

And yes, they WERE a class of 35, as were others who were more of a handful. There were also classes of 10 or 15 who were bottom sets / SEN who are much harder to deal with. But those children do not have data supporting top grades.

This IS the reality of state schools today. Children do learn and teachers work very, very hard. But I stand by my belief that many children in that and other similar schools average about 2 hours a day of learning.

Sorry gagajo to keep picking. I promise this is my last post on this. Your initial post said "an average, middle-ability class" now you're saying 'the same students...disrupting every lesson, until they're suspended'
Those sorts of kids exist, but not in classes of 35. They're possibly in SN, or bottom small group.
My gripe is you're making sweeping generalisations to lay-people who imagine, like Waterloo Road, that classes like this are disrupting every pupil. And this is at a time when teachers desperately need the support of the public. Teachers will be leaving in droves soon (same as NHS workers) because of vile negativity, perpetuated by Daily Mail and their like. I taught secondary for 39 years, all over England, rich areas, desperately disadvantaged areas etc, and I don't recognise most of what I read in the media, particularly when individual incidents are passed off as the norm.