HE myths

Myths from the other side

• Home ed is a community that works together and supports eachother
  
  I love this one. You hear it a lot, but as the HE community is made up of people, and people all have different ways of looking at the world and different ideas of what is in the best interests of everyone else, combined with the fact that people are generally not renowned for always putting the interests of others before themselves… see how it very quickly doesn’t stand up? Lovely thought though.
  
  The reality is that we are a community where many feel they do better both educationally and emotionally if they work with others. As a result, they do. And given that most people chose not to screw their friends over (or people in general really), on the whole, everything runs smoothly.
  
  However…
  
  On the larger scale, HEors can have very different takes and philosophies of the world so find it rather tricky to come together as a whole community. What can bind us though, is a common enemy – thank you, Mr Badman – and then we do rise up in numbers, although often still with several different approaches, which can result in animosity. On the smaller scale, if you are not in someone’s immediate clique, you might not always find the help and support you are looking for. There are usually a couple in the wider community who will move hell and high water for others they don’t know (they’re the best!!), but most feel either not qualified or able to help, or just not obliged to (think society as you know it, but on a smaller scale).
  
  What can I say, sometimes people are nice, sometimes they’re not, sometimes we are bonded by a common theme, sometimes we’re not. It is the same the world over.
  
  Which leads us to the second myth…
  
  
• HE is an inclusive community
  
  No. Just, no.
  
  99.9% of all groups that run are run by families in their own homes with their own friends. As a result, very few are willing to open their houses up to complete strangers, which most see as being quite fair enough. People are also creating a bespoke education specifically for their child(ren). Consequently, they like to ‘vet’ other families before bringing them into a group. They don’t want a group that works well to be suddenly disrupted by another family that doesn’t click with everyone else. I’m not saying it is right or wrong, it just is what it is. However, this makes it really difficult for new families to join in the community. Particularly those with older children. When they are young you can hang about in parks and make contacts with the other parents very easily, but this becomes harder as the children get older, and near impossible once the children are 15+ – if there isn’t an organised group in your area for this age group, your child will find it very difficult to make new connections within HE, so most have to look towards out of school clubs and activities for their socialising, or start a group themselves
  
  To get on in the HE community, like any job, it is all about networking. You can call it ‘making friends’ if it makes you feel better, but it all amounts to the same thing. The more other parents like you believe you to have similar educational philosophies and see what educational skills you have to offer (ex-teachers always attract new friends fast!), the more likely they are to invite your child along to groups. Equally, if other children struggle to get on with your child, the more likely you are not to be invited. It can be a really tough system if you struggle to connect with others.
  
  
• You can get into the best universities with just enthusiasm, a nerd’s knowledge and a big smile
  
  Again, no.
  
  For some, this used to be the case way back when, and it tended to be those universities that were willing to interview and take the odd gamble on a student, i.e. Oxford/Cambridge. This doesn’t seem to be the case anymore, at least I haven’t heard of anyone managing it in the recent past. It is more do-able as a mature student, or going up the steps through Open University, but for 99.999% of all teens who want to go to a Russell Group university while still a teenager, they will need conventional GCSEs/IGCSEs and A-levels. Sorry to disappoint.
  
  
• HEed children will teach themselves to read
  
  This is nearly true, except it is missing that little, but most important word, ‘some’. Some children will indeed do it effortlessly by four, others by eight, but others still may need a bit of help and direction, particularly if it later turns out they have a learning difficulty such as dyslexia. What comes as a surprise to some parents is that reading, writing, spelling and punctuation are NOT intuitive to everyone. I personally was rather surprised that they were intuitive to anyone! Funny what you learn about people along the way.
  
  
• HEed children have a innate desire to learn and are throughly self-motivated
  
  If only!!! HEed children are children just like any other; all are motivated to do what they enjoy, some are motivated to do what their parents enjoy them doing, most show absolutely no motivation whatsoever for anything their parents want them to do, i.e. academic work or something that could lead to a financially viable future career.
  
  If a family is taking the exams approach, the majority of HEed children show no real inclination to work (unless there is a direct carrot or stick involved) until about 14/15. At this point they start realising all their friends will be going to college and if they don’t get the grades they will be left behind with just their parents for company. A petrifying, but more importantly, motivational thought for any mainstream adolescent.
  
  
• HEed parents love and know their children best
  
  This one tends to get thrown around when some government official starts looking into home education and addresses the balance of state vs. the individual.
  
  The theory goes: only a loving parent would actively choose to be around their children all day, and by being with your child all the time, you know them better than anyone, thus, the home-educating parent is the only one who should make decisions for their child as they know them and what is in their best interests better than anyone.
  
  The theory, however, ignores… that parents are humans and make mistakes all the time, and that even loving people are flawed, choosing to, for example, make decisions out of fear or self-preservation over self-less love and infallible knowledge.
  
  Most parents do love their children more than anyone else, but a) this is not a competition, so why someone would feel the need to say this is beyond me, and b) love does not make you immune to human failings.
  
  As for ‘knowing’ our children, the saying goes ‘you can never really know another person’… Most parents probably do know their children better than anyone else does, but that doesn’t always mean you can make the best decisions for them – I may know my own children as well as anyone can know their child, but I am neither the one to say whether they need their appendixes removed or am the one to remove them myself if they do. Making decisions, let alone wise decisions, become even harder if you are emotionally caught up in situation.
  
  This does not mean experts or professionals are always better placed to make decisions for your off-spring, generally they are not, but it does mean that you should listen to what they have to say, and where possible, work with them.
  
  Years of training and experience do count for something be it either as a child specialist or a parent to an individual child. As the saying goes, ‘it takes a village to raise a child’.
  
  
• HEing parents do not abuse their children
  
  On the whole, no they don’t, but on the whole, parents of schooled children do not abuse their children either. However, just like schooled children, there have been documented cases of abuse to home-educated children, and so it is only responsible to recognise this and address it.
  
  It is very important to note that there is nothing to suggest that HEed children are more at risk than any other group of children, or that laws need to be changed in order to try and protect vulnerable HEed children; there are already adequate laws in place – when things go wrong it is nearly always due to a lack of application of those laws or a problem of communication between different state departments rather than the laws regarding HE themselves. However, quite a number of HEors continue to argue that there is no abuse in HE, with the reason being that they have never seen any.
  
  Firstly, victims of abuse tend not to go around with a badge on saying ‘I am abused’, secondly, abusers tend not to abuse in front of an audience and thirdly, not all HEors and their children meet up with other HEors – the biggest regular meet-up of HEors in Cambridgeshire caters for about 100 children, the LEA have 800 registered HEed children in the county (2019) and it is assumed there is about another 800 more who are not registered. Just as abuse can go undetected in schools for a child’s entire academic career, so too it can go undetected in our community.
  
  There is no reason to believe a child is at any more risk of abuse in HE than if they went to school, but stats on abuse in general, by the very secretive nature of abuse, are not complete. Abuse happens to children in all social settings, be it home, school, youth group, church etc. etc. Burying our heads in the sand and deciding that if we can’t see it, it isn’t there just puts more children at risk. Equally, assuming it is everywhere and treating everyone as such is equally damaging.
  
  
• Money isn’t an issue to HEing
  
  It is possible to HE very successfully on a shoe string, but at no point is it easy.
  
  The more money you can spend on education the easier it is, and the more opportunities open up to you. And with more cash, the more you can outsource the mundane jobs, such as cleaning, which may well improve life in general.
  
  However, lack of money can give a creative edge to your HEing journey, that you might not bother to come up with if you can just throw money at a problem, not to mention that children gain an invaluable education about life through seeing you budget your own spending, and learning to cope when they see others having more than they do.
  
  Where money really helps is with ‘school’ trips, technological resources, such as computers, printers etc., general educational resources (although the more you have, the less you use, in my experience), paying for exams and textbooks, and with external tutors if there is a specialist subject you want to learn or if the parent is not/does not feel equipped to teach that subject.
  
  
• HEing is easy
  
  No. It is all consuming. Some approaches are more hands on than others, but when the entire outcome for your child’s happiness, education and well-being rests on you and the world is looking on (often just waiting to watch you fail), even the most laissez faire home educator feels the strain at some point.
  
  It is true that some get an easier ride than others, depending on personal circumstances, and some will put additional stress on themselves – perfectionists, those who did really well themselves at school, and ex-teachers interestingly, often have it the hardest – but whether you take the role of mentor, facilitator, teacher or dictator, it is still a full-time job on top of the job of being the full-time primary carer to those very same children (and possibly additional ones who go to school), and taking on traditional housewife/husband roles, not to mention those that have additional care work of elderly relatives, disabled children/partners, younger infants, and those that work from home or have part-time paid employment too.
  
  In the end, something at some point generally gives. The first thing is always the housework – if you see an HEor with a tidy house, they have usually got a cleaner, a Ritalin habit or have outsourced the HEing side of things. For most of us, this is no real biggy, after all, you can always catch up on the cleaning when the children leave home, however, if larger stresses from HEing are not managed (be it due to financial worries, children or adults with mental health concerns, too big a work load, lack of space to be your own person, lack of leisure time, lack of time with your partner, lack of recognition for the job you do, etc. etc) it has been known to result in things like burn out or even marriage break ups. It’s rarely talked about, but it isn’t as uncommon as perhaps people like to believe – more than once I have seen children suddenly back in school literally over night. Being aware of the potential problems, looking out for signs of when things are not quite going as you would like, and changing things as and when needed to keep everyone’s needs met is a huge part of a successful HE journey, and is a tricky enough job in and of itself.
  
  
• The Local Education Authority (LEA) is out to get you
  
  This one isn’t quite so clear cut.
  
  The law with regard to HE and the LA is very clear: for the average everyday HEor, the LA has no say over how you HE in the slightest (assuming there is no reason to believe that you are not meeting your obligations as a parent – just to be clear, HEing is not a reason in itself). The LA are, however, made up of individuals. How the LA treat people in an area is entirely dependent on who are employed within that body. Most individuals in all walks of life do not have a big agenda, they just want to do their job, take home their wage and hopefully help a few people along the way. As the law is very clear, in that the LA have absolutely no right to just interrogate families and ‘doorstep’ them as and when they fancy, most individuals with in the LA (at least in Cambridgeshire) are happy to go along with this – why give yourself more work that isn’t even within your jurisdiction when you have 101 other more pressing matters to attend to?
  
  However, sometimes you get an LA employee who has a vision, ideals and philosophies that fundamentally disagree with the idea of HE on principle. These tend to be people who have met very few HEors, have minimal understanding of what we do and how we do it, and know little about the law regarding HE (or from a more cynical perspective, consciously reject it on the grounds that they feel it is inadequate). Across the country there have been many reports of LAs who have repeatedly over-stepped the mark with regard to how they treat and interact with home educators and this has led to a lot of bad will and animosity between the HEing community and the LA. Unfortunately, it is usually the more vulnerable of our community and those less up on the legal side of HE that suffer worse under an aggressively anti-HE LEA employee.
  
  So are the LA out to get you? Well that really depends on your individual LA representatives, but the Cambridgeshire LA don’t currently show any signs of being that way inclined… for now…
  
  
• Schools are out to indoctrinate your children to the ideology of the state
  
  This is all getting a bit too Big Conspiracy Theory for me. If you have a tendency to think this way, I can’t be bothered to convince you otherwise. I personally don’t have enough faith in our state to be competent enough to pull off a sensible cross-country education system (that is no judgement on the teachers involved, the problems are all much higher up), so how they could possible have and be in the process of successfully executing a national indoctrination regime is beyond me.
  
  
• Parents HE because they love their children
  
  Well of course we love our children, and if we didn’t love them most of us would not bother to HE, but the main problem with this statement is not what it says about HEors, but more what it says about non-HEors. It implies that those who send their children to school do not love their children. Well, that is clearly not true.
  
  The other problem with it is that it ignores the failings of the education system that push some people into home ed against their will. HEing isn’t always a positive choice for everyone with quite a number doing it because they haven’t got any alternative. Reasons include things like: off-rolling, schools not able to cater for a child’s individual needs (e.g. SEND, the extremely academically able, undiagnosed ADHD, dyslexia, autism, those suffering trauma from non-school related events, etc.), bullying within school not being dealt with adequately enough, schoolphobia or simply because they can’t get into a local school due to over-subscription.
  
  
• HE is best for all children
  
  It works for some, not for others, just like all forms of education. Every child is a unique individual, living in a set of circumstances and family make-up that is unique to them. To assume any one model can ever fit everyone is just short-sighted. One size does not fit all – after all, that is why our children are not in school.

• HEed children come out with no qualifications
  
  All the children I know who have come out of HE at 16+ (and there have been a huge number over the years) have or were working toward a qualifications of one description or another. As external candidates, it’s not easy, and it is not cheap, but we want our children to have a future just like every other parent.
  
  Most do GCSEs or IGCSEs, a large number go on to do A-levels either at college or at home, some do apprenticeships, others vocational courses at FE colleges, and many go on to get university degrees or professional qualifications.
  
  
• All HEed children are at risk of child abuse
  
  No more than children in school, and there is absolutely no data to suggest anything to the contrary. The only difference is that it is often said about HE children that they are ‘invisible’, however, that really isn’t the case. We take our children out of the house like ‘normal’ people, engage in community activities just like ‘normal’ people, visit doctors and dentists exactly like the ‘normal’ people do, meet up with friends and family, see neighbours, go to libraries, museums, shops, galleries, cinemas, parks, swimming pools, music lessons, rugby clubs, ice-skating rinks, choirs etc. etc. just as you would expect from ‘normal’ people. In short, we are normal people, we just home educate our children rather than send them to school. So to treat us any differently or with more suspicion than the rest of society is discrimination.
  
  We are visible, we are everywhere (but not in a creepy way), you may well have met us, you just hadn’t realised that we were home educating because we forgot to put on our home-ed membership badge when we left the house.
  
  
• HEed children are feral
  
  Generally only the ones that appear on Channel 5 programmes. Most of us like a routine of some description, not least so that we know when our children are going to bed and we can get the gin out.
  
  
• HEed children are overly controlled by their parents
  
  Come on, you can’t have it both ways!! Feral and overly-controlled?!? Make you mind up. Trash fly-on-the-wall TV, you have a lot to answer for.
  
  
• HEed children don’t have social skills/friends
  
  Most children in my experience don’t, but the less glib response is…
  
  It depends what you mean by social skills, if you mean being able to stand on street corners with other packs of teenagers talking about their sexual exploits, drug taking and shop lifting (or maybe that is only Cambridge teenagers?), then no, most HEors struggle to do that. If you mean sit down in a classroom and follow random rules without questioning, then again, nope, HEed children aren’t fabulous at that either, but many HEors feel there is a lot more to socialising than being able to thrive in the school environment. (www.theguardian.com/education/2019/may/10/shrinking-break-times-in-english-schools-impacting-social-skills https://simplehomeschool.net/homeschooling-and-socialization-how-to-answer-the-socialization-question/)
  
  The social skills they often do possess are: the ability to talk more confidently with adults (a high child:adult ratio in our community means they get a lot of practice); they will often be more articulate than your average child (again, a side effect of communicating with a lot of adults over a long period of time, but also a high proportion of HEed children are avid readers); they often have a great knowledge of some very specific interest, current affairs topic or something you tend not to associate with their years (some call it pretentious, but that’s harsh); and they are very used to making friends across all cultures, religions and ages with their relationships based on the joy of shared interests rather than just because they happen to be in the same socio-economic class, from the same ethnic or religious back-ground, in the same part of town, in the same school and are of the same sex and age – when numbers are limited for the candidate of ‘perfect friend’, you become become much more open minded about who would make a good friend (www.bera.ac.uk/blog/socially-mixed-schools-but-limited-social-mixing-childrens-and-adults-friendships-across-social-class-and-ethnic-difference).
  
  Another reason some people feel HEed children’s social skills are lacking is because although HEed children can often be more advanced in some ways, they are also allowed to be children for longer, so can seem quite immature in many other respects compared to schooled children. They get to the same point as schooled children in the end, they are just allowed to mature at a much slower pace, so you may well find a 15-year old playing duck tape swords and lego (and adults too!) or a 12-year old playing make-believe, but why not? They have their whole lives to be adults. After all, what is the hurry?
  
  We also have a high proportion of children whose parents chose to never put them into school because they have such things as learning difficulties (diagnosed and undiagnosed)/delayed development/are summer babies etc. and those who have come out of school due to school-induced trauma or anxiety, all of which may impact how the child develops and interacts with others, so of course this will skew the perception of how the average home-educated child ‘turns out’. (www.goodschoolsguide.co.uk/special-educational-needs/autism/social-skills).
  
  There are thousands of HE groups and meet ups all over the country, with the general guesstimate of somewhere between 60,000 and 120,000 home-educated children in the country (there are no complete stats, but about 60,000 are known to the Local Authorities at any one time). We do meet up, and the children do socialise and form their own friendship circles. Some may struggle to make friends for any number of reasons, but that is exactly the same as children who go to school.
  
  
• HEed children don’t know how to sit down and work
  
  Some can, some can’t (again, just like schooled children). It depends on any number of factors including learning difficulties, individual development, mental health, interest in a subject, age, how the parents and role models of the child behave etc. etc.
  
  Some parents do actively take the philosophy that you should never force a child to sit and work, and the child will eventually choose to do this voluntarily in their own time, meaning children and teens may very well get up and walk off half way through an organised session (although parents that take this approach tend not to sign a child up to sessions unless they know their children will be interested in it). This may be at odds with many mainstream expectations of children, but the parents that take this approach do get the results for their children in the end, so is this their problem or just the problem of those who disapprove?
  
  
• HEed children cannot read and write
  
  Firstly, it is important not to confuse learning to read and write after the age of 4, to never learning to read and write. Many people have very different ideas of when is the perfect age to learn. As you undoubtably know, in a conventual UK state school you are expected to start learning how to read when you start school the first September after your fourth birthday, but many start much earlier in pre-school. However, in much of mainland Europe, children don’t start going to school until they are 6 (www.nfer.ac.uk/media/1318/44414.pdf). Many HEors chose to follow a later learning and a child-led approach to teaching their children to read, so their children will learn at an older age than their schooled counterparts and more in line with education in mainland Europe. What is more important is not the age the children learn to read but the standards they have attained by the end of their education. (www.otago.ac.nz/news/news/otago006408.html, www.thoughtco.com/early-reader-late-reader-does-it-matter-1833103)
  
  Secondly, as mentioned above, many HE because they don’t fit the mould for formal schooling. As a result, we have a high proportion of children with learning difficulties or other issues that mean it is much harder for the child to learn to read or write than your average child. Being in school would not make any difference to their situation, in fact it can often make the problem worse, as the child needs to go at its own pace with teaching specifically targeted at them, which is near impossible in a class of 30.
  
  Thirdly, the vast, vast majority of home-educated children are proof that this is completely false. Our children can and do read and write all the time, we just tend not to sit down and read to our critics – people see what they want to rather than looking at the facts.
  
  
• HEed children spend all day playing
  
  Yup, some do… and? If the children get the same results at the end of their compulsory educational journey, what does it matter. (www.theguardian.com/education/2016/sep/20/grammar-schools-play-europe-top-education-system-finland-daycare)
  
  Playing has been proven to be a very effective way of learning for many people. Don’t knock it till you try it (https://education.gov.scot/parentzone/learning-at-home/learning-through-play/).
  
  
• HEed children have no future
  
  This was exactly what was said about my children when I took them out of school 10 years ago and, let’s be honest, it is just a really silly thing to say. Everyone who isn’t dead has a future, the question is whether it is a future that someone would want…
  
  Given that many refuse to put their children into school because they believe that the local school on offer is inadequate, I think it is fair to say that ambition is not just a concept you learn in a school environment. Rest assured, a huge number of home-educated children have gone on to do a great many wonderful occupations and activities (www.topeducationdegrees.org/successful-people-who-were-homeschooled/) and lead full and happy lives. HE is far from a death sentence that, unfortunately for some, school can be (www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/school-suicide-children-bullying-anxiety-back2school-a9088341.html).
  
  
• HEing parents are control freaks who don’t want to let their children go
  
  This one often comes to people’s minds because they can’t think of any other reason why you wouldn’t put your children in school.
  
  Some parents are control freaks, it is true, but I found that exact same thing when my children were at school. Some parents are just weird. We don’t have a disproportionate number of them, you just see more of them because you don’t leave your children at the school gates and then disappear.
  
  
• HEing is impossible if you don’t have a teaching qualification or at least a degree
  
  That is clearly untrue with thousands, of children coming through home education very successfully every year, having had only their non-teacher trained parents for educational support. In fact, one of the best home educators I have ever seen had no qualifications whatsoever. She was a fantastic teacher, learning everything alongside her son, being constantly driven by the motivation to make sure that he didn’t ‘fail’ like she did, and the results were impressive.
  
  Interestingly, we do have a lot of formally trained teachers in our community too, and actually they often find it harder than your run-of-the-mill home educator.
  
  Firstly, there is the pressure from feeling that people expect you to do a great job – if you can’t teach your own kids, how can you teach anyone else’s? Of course, it is far more complicated than that and the relationship dynamics between a teacher/parent and a child makes all the difference in how a child learns from that teacher, but it is added pressure nevertheless.
  
  Secondly, they sometimes initially try to reproduce school at home where they cover every subject just like they do in schools (except in schools you have a teacher for every subject and it is not just one person running themselves ragged). Ultimately, this approach will lead to burnout – one person can only ever do so much. As a home educator, unless you are able to financially support outsourcing most of the learning, you just have to accept that you can’t cover everything that is on offer in a school – instead we tend to opt for depth over breadth and focus on learning to love learning and how to learn rather than trying to learn any one thing in particular.
  
  And thirdly, many have said that they have had to de-school themselves before really benefiting from what HE has to offer, as they too were institutionalised and felt there was only one way to learn until they found out differently. The school teaching experience is very different to the home-ed teaching experience. They are not really comparable in any way. This is not a judgement on either school teachers or home-ed parents, they are just very, very different things, like home baking compared to running a restaurant.
  
  
• HEors all eat whole foods, and have a particular penchant for lentils
  
  I had an HEing friend who told me how when she got chatting to a member of staff at the local supermarket and mentioned that she had her children with her because she home educated them, the lady immediately said, “Oh, well I know what you will be wanting then,” and walked my friend and her children straight over to the whole foods aisle.
  
  Home educating is not synonymous with ‘alternative lifestyle’, ‘healthy living’, 1970s hippy communes, or anything else. It is just learning outside of the formal school system.
  
  Some HEors love a lentil, others are less keen. My friend had gone into the supermarket for frozen pizza.
  
  
• The LEA are your friend – if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear
  
  Every parent has the parental responsibility to educate their child. Most people sign that duty over to the state education system once their child is of school age, but some choose to fulfil that duty themselves. The implication of ‘nothing to hide’ is that someone has a right to see what you are doing. The state has no more right to examine how you home educate than it does to examine whether you feed your children adequately or which (if any) religion you choose to bring your child up in – the assumption is that you are fulfilling your legal obligation to care for your child and their interests, unless there is evidence to the contrary. The reason schools are Ofsteded is because they are looking after someone else’s children.
  
  Some LEA staff can take a very aggressive approach that has left many HEors and their children in an emotional mess. There isn’t much to be gained from giving you all the personal testimonies that have been made over the years – you can ask on the HE forums if you‘re wanting them – but what people do need to know is that if HEors do ever come over as paranoid, it is because they have a lot of reason to be. There has been a lot of historic ill-will and mistrust between HEors and the LEA, due to LEAs repeatedly over-stepping the mark, and this takes a long time to heal.
  
  The LEA can indeed be your friend if it takes the approach of accepting the law as it stands, and are keen to work with and support HEors. And in these instances, yes, you have absolutely nothing to fear, but this has not always proved to be the case, with some HEors feeling very bullied over the years.
  
  Not surprisingly, those counties that have LEAs that try and build relationships with HEors, on the whole, do much better, gaining voluntary registration and general information from HEors.
  
  
• HEing parents can’t say no to their children
  
  This is a matter of parenting style, not an HE issue. Some HE parents choose to parent without using the word ‘no’, others use it all the time. It’s really one for the parenting literature rather than the HE literature.
  
  
• School is best for all children
  
  School is designed with the average child in mind. Some schools can and do fit round individual needs and requirements, others are less able to do this. Schools have to continually try and balance the needs of the majority against those of the individual, this will mean that sometimes the individual will not get what they need from the school setting.
  
  School can be a fantastic experience for some, but by no means all.