Is Home Education a "Disruptive Innovation"?

There's a pattern to the way innovations disrupt apparently immutable markets.   First they are seen as some kind of joke or in the case of home education, evidence of an embarrassing failure and a complete irrelevance. Then they are regarded as an illegal threat, before finally being accepted as the way forward. This is what happened with, for example, the on-line distribution of music and videos.  The questions for this post are:

 - is this what is happening with home education?

 - what stage are we at now?

 - and will home education ever be widely seen as a positive paradigm for education? 

There is almost certainly a recent upsurge in numbers of home educators, but this doesn't mean that home education has moved up into positive paradigm territory. This growth is largely driven by a confluence of failures in the schooling system: a lack of school places at secondary level,  cuts to school budgets which mean that there's no money for teachers, teaching assistants and SEND provision, pressures from various government intiatives and Ofsted which means that schools pressure families to remove children who might mess with their Ofsted assessments, more pressure from Ofsted which means that teachers spend their days filling in tick boxes rather than being left alone to devise inspirational lessons, a tedious one size fits all National Curriculum that is being imposed ever more tightly,  parents pulling out school phobic children in order to avoid being fined by the LA for unauthorised absences, and a lot of great teachers just throwing in the towel and walking away.

And let's not forget the effect all the above has upon the young people in the system.  Two thirds of children are stressed by life at secondary school and you can bet your life that this sort of stress is not the sort of stress that helps you learn!   Seriously parents, what are we actually doing here?  It seems we are forcing two thirds of young people to attend a place where they are meant to acquire a suitable education but which is actually completely ruinous in terms of achieving that end. 

And lets not get in to all the stuff about unaddressed school bullying and the total unremitting boredom of having to sit in a classroom over-stuffed with other young people of varying abilities, all with different needs which must be variously addressed while you stare out the window and wish you could just float out through it and fly away.

However, this growth in numbers of HEors might not just be a matter of a creaking school system.  It could also be due to other more positive factors as well. Popular educationalists such as Ken Robinson have been making an argument for HE in very public places and the internet has radically increased the ease with which home education can be undertaken.  What with websites such Khan Academy, Duolingo,  PLOS, Chrome's Unpaywall, virtual colleges and MOOCs, and all the truly wonderful stuff you can find on YouTube and through Google, we can truly say we live in an age in which information is no longer at a premium.   Home educators can also get support and advice on-line and in real life groups far more easily now than only a decade ago, when the internet was more limited and real life HE groups relatively small.

Realistically though, these positive reasons for the growth in HE are probably in the minority. We can only hope that they herald better things to come, but the truth of the matter is that home education is currently moving from the "batty irrelevant" stage, to the "potentially illegal" stage, as evidenced by the fact that the DfE have instigated a Call for Evidence  which introduces the prospect of new regulatory control of HE, either in the form of legal change or a harsher in interpretation of current law,   Some passages of the superficially anodyne reinterpretation of current law even introduce the prospect of LAs being able to manage an ad hoc elimination of HE altogether, if read in the wrong light, (see s9.4 d on page 25), a point that hasn't been missed by home educators and about which they will be complaining loudly in their consultation responses. 

One of the main nominal reasons for a crack-down on home educators, on top of the growth in numbers, has been the assertion by Michael Wilshaw (then head of Ofsted)  that there was evidence to suggest that illegal, unregistered schools are using the freedoms afforded to genuine home educators as a cover for their activities.  However, a report undertaken by the Centre for Personalised Learning concluded that whilst Wilshaw's concerns that illegal organisations could exploit home education regulations to avoid closure were indeed potentially valid, this was not a reason to tighten regulation on home education, but rather should lead to strengthening of regulation of unregulated schools.

The tarring of home educators as radicalisers of their children has caused a media frenzy over the last few years.  It looks as if public sentiment might easily be sufficiently swayed to see home educators as deeply evil subversives who should be put away for ever and a day, and for this reason alone, it would very easy to conclude that are we are currently firmly in the "illegal" phase of a disruptive innovation process.

It is a crucial stage right now which could go either way.  Home education for it to retain its value, must not become fettered by government regulation and expectations as to what an education must look like.  Many of HEd children have already been failed by an over-centralised view of what every child must learn.  Home educators, on the other hand, can personalise their educational provision to genuinely suit the child, which almost invariably proves invaluable for so many children, as Ken has understood when he says that HE has a lot to offer by way of a pedagogy.

As home education, in its new tech inspired iteration, matures, the government would be wise to learn to work with us, rather than against us.  We could bolster a creaking school system with new models that do offer genuine support to children who do not thrive in school.   If budgets could more easily follow a child through the EOTAs system, or if Red Balloon of the Air and other initiatives with virtual colleges offering a real life support group were given proper funding and support, many more children would receive a suitable education.  Other home educators just need to be left alone to get on with it: money would be far better spent on social work departments than in chasing a load of well-functioning but resentful HEors about all over the place, trying to tell them what to do.

We need to go beyond being seen as a threat, and be welcomed as a valuable alternative instead.

Home Education is NOT THE PROBLEM

With Lord Soley's bill lining up for a second reading, home educators find themselves at the butt end of some simply terrible BBC reporting here and here. Gill has done her usual expert job making mincemeat of one of these pieces, and perhaps there isn't a need to say any more, except I want to - OK, yes mainly because I need to vent, but also because I want to tell you what a teacher friend said to me this morning.

He said, and bear in mind, he's been a teacher for over thirty years, and has only been peering over my home educating shoulder for the last three years, "It isn't home education and home education law that's the problem.  It's schools".   Get that, Lord Soley and all those whose brains are turned to mush by the desire to be re-elected and not say unpopular if true things: It's schools and the related regulatory institutions that are the problem.  Sort that mess out and STOP BLAMING HOME EDUCATION!

Now, let me tell you for why:  (hat tip: teacher friend who didn't eat his porridge till it had gone completely cold because he needed to wave his spoon around a lot), schools are the problem because head teachers are effectively forced to off-roll pupils who are not performing to the necessary standard and this is because heads and teachers are judged on the grades pupils achieve.  If Johnny gets five U grades (or whatever they're called nowadays), Ofsted adjudges heads and teachers the most execrable fuckwits and out they go, losing their jobs, livelihoods, houses, cars, marriages, self respect, you name it, everything goes in an all round personal disaster of epic proportions.

It doesn't matter that Johnny's teacher has been providing excellent, entertaining and informative lessons, and that Johnny has simply decided to spend his time staring out the window. In a piece of idiocy that is almost masterful in it's daring misrepresentation of reality  - given that teachers can't just open up the top of pupils' heads and pour knowledge into them and that pupils do actually have to open their minds themselves in order to learn anything at all - it is nonetheless still the teacher's fault that Johnny has failed.

This mutilation of reality is deemed a good thing by our elected representatives because it isn't a vote winner to have to tell parents that their precious progeny have the brains and attention span of a gnat.  Parents form a far bigger part of the electorate than teachers, and anyway, teachers have nowhere to turn electorally because every party would encourage Ofsted to judge them in a similar manner.

And then there's the added pressure upon teachers in that there is no money for help with pupils who struggle to learn in an average sort of a way.  Even in the very unlikely event that such a pupil actually does have an Education, Health and Care Plan, it is still unlikely that this plan will actually be fulfilled in any meaningful way and this along with all the other pupils with learning differences who don't have EHCPs means that teachers are left with huge classes containing children who actually need specialised provision that they cannot hope to deliver.

So all in all, even the very best of teachers are caught in a vice, with pressure from all sides.  The only release is to chuck Johnny out, telling the parents on the way just so as to make it sound concerned and legal: "So yes, you're going to home educate him," for which read "Phew, now we're bailed out of this holy mess that is not of our making!"

And so it is that disaffected young people end up being home educated and yipppeee from our elective representative's point of view, because home education is an easy target: tiny demographic, which doesn't garner much public understanding or sympathy, we can pick on them, rather than look at the massive mess in our own back yard.

So don't be fooled.  The problem is NOT home education or home education law.  It's a combination of lack of funding in schools, the desire to win votes and the subsequent distortions of learning theory, all of which means that young people end up being home educated without any prior preparation or knowledge about how it works.

BUT, you might be thinking, given that these young people are now being at least nominally home educated, perhaps the law surrounding HE does need to be changed?  The answer to that is a resounding NO.  These children ARE  KNOWN TO THE AUTHORITIES who already have all the law they need to get to young people who may be falling through the net and yet social work teams around the country can't cover the ground as it is.  A shortage of social workers is actually the problem that needs sorting.

OK, so I've calmed down a bit, though of course there's still a lot more that could be said on the crap learning theory in schools and how this could so easily be replaced with personalised learning and a little bit of creativity round the childcare aspect of school, but that's for another post. 

But right now, before I have a proper hope of regaining some composure, I feel the need to make another point: in one of the pieces, someone accused home educators of being irrationally afraid of the authorities.   I've just had to delete a lot of profanities right here, but I still want people to know how downright idiotic that assertion is.  Home educators aren't irrational about this. They have seen HE families torn apart by the authorities who wade in and do simply dreadful things in family courts with total impunity, the horror of the outcome being exacerbated because the authorities assume that families are home educating because they must have something to hide.

Our fears are not irrational.  Children and families have been devastated by the idiotic hand of a powerful state which in the family courts can get away with the most terrible injustices. This is why the law must, at the very least, not become more invasive: the state must not become more powerful, more intrusive and more wilfully misguided than it is already.