The clumsy title of this blog is actually deliberate, as I wish to compare two cases of children not attending school.Many of you will have seen the headlines a few weeks back about ideas to stop benefits of parents whose children consistently truant. This is not a political blog, and I'm not going to debate the proposal - which is nothing more than an idea at this point anyway. However, it made me think about this in contrast to children who never go to school - home schooled children.I had been examining the issue of home schooling as a potential opportunity for tuition. I instinctively felt that maybe parents who were home schooling might feel they could manage subjects such as geography and history more easily than "difficult" science. (Hey, I'm biased, what can I say humanities teachers? Oops - did I say biased? What I mean is - I've examined all the evidence and come up with a model that best explains those facts, until some other data or model comes along that works better, at which point I'll take that as my accepted paradigm...)I looked at the guidelines for home schooling. Basically, it is up to LAs what they offer in terms of guidance/help and importantly assessment. They "can" make an informal request for evidence of the child's education.Here's the guidelines of London Borough of Enfield, an area I offer my services to.Now, I haven't managed to uncover much data on prevalence of homeschooling in the UK - it feels that it's more common in the US, often on religious grounds, but those are just broad brush stroke findings. None the less, I ended up feeling uncomfortable about all this. Without getting party political - this isn't about bashing coalition policies - I wondered how it helps a childs education to remove parent's benefits, particularly when there may be a home schooled child down the road whose educational needs are not being met. Home schooled children don't receive any government money, true - and I guess the LA will feel accountable for the funds spent on the school place for the truant - but isn't government still ultimately responsible for the education of children?This is a blog, not an academic paper, so maybe there's a bit of muddled thinking going on. I still feel uneasy about it though.Anyone got any thoughts? I'd love to hear from home schoolers too - this isn't a dig at you either.
In : tuition
Tags:
home schooling
truancy
parental responsibility
local authority
benefits