A Deadline Goes WHOOSH!

(Ok, I confess, I am posting this a full year and a half after the fact. I wrote up a couple of posts on my phone but never got round to actually blogging them, so I'm catching up with myself and fiddling the dates, because it's my blog and I can cheat if I want to!)

15 January 2016 was an important day for us. 15 January was the deadline for applying for a primary school place for Daniel... and we didn't. It's a slightly grey area because legally he doesn't have to be in education until the term after his 5th birthday, which would be September 2017. However, the vast majority of his peers will start in September this year at the achingly young age of 4.

I had heard of so many people getting letters inviting them to apply for school places that I was actually rather disappointed when we didn't get one. Apparently, not every area sends out letters as there are supposedly posters up in various places (children's centres, libraries) telling parents when the deadline is, though I haven't seen a single one! We decided before Daniel was born that we wanted to home educate, so we wouldn't have done anything with the letter-that-never-came but I was looking forward to filing it under 'ignore'; it felt like a proactive step in our choice not to send Daniel to school. In its absence, though, we had to make do with the more abstract act of smiling as the deadline went whooshing by.

So what now? Well, nothing really changes. In UK law, home education is the default: Section 7 of the Education Act 1996 states that:
The parent of every child of compulsory school age shall cause him to receive efficient full-time education suitable - 
a) to his age, ability and aptitude, and 
b) to any special needs he may have,
either by regular attendance at school or otherwise. [my emphasis]

In other words, it is our responsibility to make sure our children are educated. We can delegate that job to a school if we wish, and the government have to provide a school place if we choose to do so, but those magic words 'or otherwise' give us the option to do things differently. We are not subject to inspections by Ofsted - they exist to check, on parents' behalf, that schools are doing the job they have been asked to do. 

Often, people are deeply concerned to hear that home educators are not monitored or regulated. But let's turn that on its head: should the police be able to investigate your life if they have no evidence that you have broken the law? Should Social Services have automatic access to your family if no one has any concerns about your children's well-being? Of course not, that would be unacceptably intrusive. The Local Authority does have powers to investigate if they have reason to believe that an HE child is not receiving a suitable education but they have no right to interfere otherwise. For many families who have chosen to home educate after their children have been utterly failed (and deeply traumatised) by the school system, the thought of the government having any control over HE is both laughable and deeply disturbing. And for those who claim that home educated children are hidden and vulnerable, it is worth remembering that every one of the high-profile child abuse cases in the last few years have involved children who were in school (or had been recently) and were already known to the authorities, who had failed to follow up the many concerns raised.

Unlike state schools, we are not required to follow the National Curriculum (or any other curriculum). Initially, this can seem worrying; how do we ensure that our children get a broad, balanced education? Well, the NC is actually rather narrow. Who decided, for example, that Maths should not include how to keep accounts or fill in a tax return? When did the Wars of the Roses and the Georgians disappear from History? Why is photography not part of Art? Could basic car maintenance not come into the Technology syllabus? Even in school, I would argue that no one comes out with a completely balanced grasp of all subjects. It only takes a personality clash with a teacher, bullying in class or a badly-timed illness to sabotage an entire subject. (For me, that happened in Geography, Chemistry, Art, Drama, Textiles, Food Tech... and I was considered to be one of the more able students. It has taken me 17 years to dismantle the mental blocks I developed around those subjects, and some are still there even now.) 

The truth is that children naturally learn a wide range of things if you let them get on with it and don't stifle their natural curiosity. We currently follow a largely autonomous approach, letting Daniel lead and simply helping him to acquire the information or skills he wants or needs at the time. Of course, we create opportunities and bring up topics we think might interest him, but he chooses whether or not to follow it up. At this age, most of his learning happens through conversation, and when we say "I don't know the answer to that; let's go and find out", we are teaching him the most valuable skill of all: how to learn. By following his interests he is also much more likely to retain the information because it is relevant and interesting. If he is busy thinking about the worm he has just found in the garden, he's not likely to be fully concentrating on Maths tasks. On the other hand, if we spend some time observing the worm, carefully put it back and go and find a book about insects, he will learn as much as he wants to know and probably still be able to recall most of it weeks or months later. Maths will come when we measure out ingredients to make Wormy Spaghetti for dinner (à la Roald Dahl's The Twits) or count his pocket money to see if he has enough to buy a toy after our visit to the library. He might also request Superworm as a bedtime story, which leads to a conversation about rhyming... and so on. 

Finally, the perennial question: "But what about socialisation?" This makes every home educator I have ever met either fall down laughing or roll their eyes, depending on how many times they have had to answer it in the past week. The answer is that there is so much to do that most of us have to actively schedule in time at home so we don't burn out. Groups, clubs, informal meets, and just getting out and about in the real world all ensure that HE kids mix with people of a wide range of ages and backgrounds. School-style segregation by age, which you won't find anywhere in adult life, is just not found in the HE community, where children of all ages play and work together quite happily. That feels to me like much better preparation for the adult world!