Take home education out of detention

There are many controversial aspects of the government’s recent Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which passed its second reading on 8 January this year. It seeks to reduce the autonomy of academies, particularly regarding the hiring of teachers, as well as compelling them to follow the National Curriculum. It also saw the government reject an amendment for a national inquiry into the handling of the ongoing national epidemic of child rape gangs. But one of the more overlooked aspects of the bill is its introduction of a national register of home educators. The first attempts to implement such a register came under Brown’s government in 2009 and plans were revived by Boris Johnson’s government in 2021. It seems likely, however, that the current government will succeed where they failed. Additionally, though, this new bill grants local authorities the right to deny a parent’s request to home educate their child. These are significant changes to the law, and they carry far reaching and under-appreciated consequences for parental rights. 

Reading the letters written to home educating parents by Labour, Tory and Lib Dem MPs, it becomes clear that there major misunderstandings about home education, and this is true also for the majority of the general public. Alongside this bill have come numerous news reports and opinion pieces about home education, similarly marked by misunderstandings, misconceptions and bad faith portrayals. Perhaps the most egregious of these in recent days has been Emma Duncan’s piece in The Times: “Its time to put home schooling in detention”.

There’s a lot to dislike in Emma Duncan’s recent opinion piece on “home schoolers”. Referring to children as “it” is not a great start, and, by the way, in the UK we generally prefer “home educators”. “Home schooling” is an Americanism, and the home-ed culture here is quite different from that in the USA — and radically different from the Nazi-riddled fever dream imagined by Duncan. I would encourage her to actually meet and spend some time with home educating parents and children before jumping to such hasty and extreme conclusions. Perhaps I can help provide such a perspective.

I was myself home educated until I went to university, and I am currently completing a doctorate in history at the University of Oxford, where I also teach undergraduate classes. So much of where I am now, I believe I owe to my upbringing in home-ed.

My experience, and that of the many hundreds of home educating families that I know, is completely unrecognisable to what Duncan describes. I was not being radicalised on zoom, indeed I was rarely at the computer or at a desk at all. I was not sitting across a table from my parent all day — I had radical freedom to explore the world. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t feral, and my parents weren’t pushy or some sort of religious or political extremists. They were ordinary people who saw childhood as valuable in and of itself.

If we don’t like ideologically charged curriculums, perhaps we should take our children out of school

All children have an innate desire to learn, but in school this is regulated and learning transformed into a labour. In this environment the natural curiosity of so many children is suppressed. I was immensely fortunate to have had an education that fostered my inquisitiveness instead. Children are always learning, they don’t need a classroom. My parents constantly provided me with opportunities to expand my horizons and develop new interests, as well as nurture existing ones. When the time came to go to university, with GCSEs and A Levels under my belt (perfectly possible to get outside of school), I was equipped far better than my school educated peers to carry out the independent study expected of us — something frequently commented on by my lecturers and supervisors.

As I understand it, Duncan’s primary objections are that home education puts children at risk of abuse and radicalisation, that it threatens social cohesion, and that it all just, well, makes her feel a bit icky as a citizen of what she terms “the rich world”.

In the recent parliamentary debate that took place as part of the Second Reading of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, Graham Stuart, MP for Beverley and Holderness since 2005, twice challenged members to “give a single case of a home educated child being harmed who was not already known to social services?” Each time his question went without a real answer. Of course, there are none. 

Duncan raises the tragic case of Sara Sharif. Many MPs have used this example in recent days too, strongly implying that she died because she was home educated. But Urfan Sharif’s (Sara’s father) history of abusing his children was known to the police since at least 2011, and her school and social services were likewise already aware that she was being abused before she was withdrawn. Social services were, for whatever reason, unable or unwilling to take her case more seriously. A register of home educators or the refusal of permission for her father to withdraw her would have made little difference. Given the longevity of the abuse, she could easily have been killed under the school’s watch, as is the case with the vast majority of similar incidents. Piling additional regulatory burdens on home educators will solve nothing. Rather social services need the support and funding to properly deal with cases they are already aware of.

Duncan also expresses concern about political or religious radicalisation. She cites in particular the presence of Neo-Nazi “home schoolers” in the US and of illegal Jewish and Muslim schools in this country. But the problem of Neo-Nazis in the US of course exists quite independently of home schooling and is in reality quite alien to Britain, whilst these illegal religious schools are already illegal (clue’s in the name). She suggests that in tackling religious extremism we should follow France’s example and ban home education (in reality the French government are increasingly restricting, but not outright banning home education). Not only has this move been challenged by the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, it flies in the face of recent peer-reviewed studies by Philippe Bongrand and Dominique Glasman in Revue française de pédagogie volume 205, which show that home education in France is not a breeding ground for Islamic extremism. 

On our own shores, the Bethnal Green Trio, including Shamima Begum, were radicalised at school (the Bethnal Green Academy) by their peers and through online content. These are the real pernicious routes of radicalisation. We might think of the mass popularity of online provocateurs and extremists like Andrew Tate in the school playground. In contrast, home education allows for much less unsupervised access to the internet. 

Of course, one gets the impression that even if Duncan was aware of this evidence, her real objection is that home educators are weird. They’re not socialised. Away from the herd of children all born in the same twelve month period and the stressed adult endeavouring to keep the lid on thirty of them, whilst simultaneously keeping them all at the pace of the government’s curriculum, how are they ever going to learn what the real adult world is all about? This is the most common misapprehension about us, but it is completely untrue. 

For Duncan, home educating parents are overprotective, and she cites Wakefield Council’s report that “anxiety” is the main reason for the growth in home educators post Covid. Yet this is a complete misreading of the report. From my own current involvement with home educators, I know that anxiety has been a key reason for the increase of home educators, but this is anxiety developed from going to school. This has always been a factor motivating many home educators, but it became more pronounced over Covid. Away from school their parents saw children who had become shells of themselves revived. How many I have heard marvel at how their children returned to their old selves, happy and excited about the world. Hopefully we can all agree that this is a good thing. I trust we have moved on from the old retort of school atrocities being “character building”.

None of this comes at the expense of socialising either. We weren’t kept sheltered in the house all day, looking out at the happy children playing in the streets. I had loads of friends across numerous vibrant groups of home educators. We were always getting together in groups of varying sizes to play, to run around in nature, to do themed activities of our own devising, or to attend the many educational workshops offered, often for free, by museums, orchestras, and environmental centres. I also had plenty of opportunity to socialise with my school-attending peers at after school clubs.

In all of this our socialising was not just constrained to our peers, but we spent time with children of various ages, and our friends’ older and younger siblings, and their parents. It is nothing like the toxic peer-lead imitation societies of the school yard — for one, there is next-to-no bullying. 

As they grow up, you can spot the home educators. They’re the ones who can look adults in the eye and keep up a conversation with them. At university, they’re the ones who put their hands up in lectures and always contribute in seminars. From the perspective of teaching undergraduates, I can tell you that social anxiety is not a home-ed problem, it is an epidemic bred almost entirely in schools. 

Duncan says “schooling is the most powerful vehicle for integration available to society” but rarely is it mixing freely with people who are different from you. Your peer group at school are exactly your age, and, given catchment areas, often reflect a very particular social, ethnic and religious demographic. My experience, however, was of mixing with people across the socioeconomic scale, male and female, of different faiths and none, different races and varied political leanings.

“The last thing we need,” says Duncan, “is a rise in children being educated apart, learning from ideologically charged curriculums and failing to learn how to get on with each other.” I quite agree. Sounds a very good reason to take your children out of schools, where teachers are increasingly projecting ideologies out of step with the majority of Britons and extreme misogyny is on the rise amongst pupils. Far better to let them experience the real world!

One of the most egregious themes that runs throughout Duncan’s rant seems to be that the freedom to make this educational choice is out of step with a modern western liberal society. She suggests that this is symptomatic of Britain’s failure to transition into a modern state, owing to our lack of a Napoleon or Bismark. I personally like that in Britain we retain traditionally prized liberties that predated the tyrant of Europe and the poster-boy for Prussian authoritarianism. We might also note that Germany’s home education ban, which Duncan admires, was not introduced by Bismark, but by Adolf Hitler.

Britain is kept backwards because of “big home schooling” — “Their lobby,” we are told, “has a voice disproportionate to its size, and has managed to squash previous attempts to regulate it.” This is probably a reference to Labour under Brown’s abortive attempt to introduce the same legislation the government is now rushing through. Then, it was not that home educators had a voice disproportionate to our numbers, but frankly because of our numbers that we were able to bring to parliament the highest number of petitions ever presented simultaneously on a single topic. But the death knell of the legislation was sounded by the Parliamentary Select Committee overseeing the Department of Education, which concluded that the evidence on which it was based was poor in the extreme.

Besides the weakness of the evidence that unregistered home education presents any real risk to safeguarding, or any of radicalisation, and the ample evidence of the immense good it does so many thousands of children, this legislation threatens a very key British liberty. As Graham Stuart MP warned in parliament, the UK has long upheld “the historical primacy of parents in determining the education of their child … [we] are now seeing a piece of legislation that removes that right and says that the state, not the parent, decides whether a child can be taken out of school … [are you] really comfortable with changing the approach for the ordinary parent?” Our freedom to home educate, I would rest, is in line with a particularly British tradition of liberty and liberality of which we should be proud.