Home education for children with special educational needs

This made me question my identity as a teacher and wonder what schools were for, and motivated me to undertake a doctoral study at The Open University (awarded in 2022) to understand what was happening.

Increasing ‘official’ numbers

Recent years have seen media focus on rising numbers of home-educated children with special educational needs. Since 2016, the Association of Directors of Children’s Services has reported the responses of the local authority to a home education survey. Even before the ‘COVID-19 effect’ of parents keeping children home from schools following lockdowns, to avoid infection, this shows an upward trend.

‘Official’ reasons for undertaking home education

Government lists some of the possible reasons for moving from school to home education, including:

• Bullying of the child at school.
• A child’s unwillingness or inability to go to school, including school phobia.
• Special educational needs, or a perceived lack of suitable provision in the school system for those needs.
• Disputes with a school over the education, special needs or behaviour of the child, in some cases resulting in ‘off-rolling’ or exclusion.

Between 2018 and 2020, I conducted research with 99 families, of whom almost three-quarters had intended for their children to be school educated.

Parental expectations of schools

Parents’ hopes for their children reflected three particular themes:

1. Initial ambitions in the context of a typical path through primary to secondary school, with around one-fifth mentioning progression to college or university.
2. Where parents considered their children to have additional needs, they believed that these would be supported in an inclusive school environment.
3. That school would nurture children’s innate appetite to learn.

Arguably, these aspirations simply reflect the requirements of statutory documents. ^[1] My participants felt their reasonable assumptions were not met by educators they had entrusted with their children’s wellbeing. Disappointed expectations led to a loss of trust in schools.

Teacher relationships

Parents described deteriorating relationships with teachers and schools when they felt their children’s support needs had been misunderstood or even denied. One parent said her child’s unmet needs resulted in ‘anxiety which led to behaviour difficulties and extremely low self-esteem.’ She considered that school staff were ‘far more concerned about the behaviours rather than the cause.’ Another reported, ‘after two terms in reception I was told not to expect anything from my eldest,’ and said teachers ‘were adamant that they could “look after” her and to leave it to them.’ Such negative experiences were recounted by almost three-quarters of the participants.

Deregistration or off-rolling

All the participants whose children had attended schools considered that their children’s needs were not met there. Over 10% of parents described children as becoming too mentally or physically unwell to attend school, and the same number reported that at least one child had been excluded.

A slightly higher proportion considered the move to home education had been entirely involuntary, at least in the early stages, reflecting reports from Ofsted. Concerns such as those raised by ISPEA are that many families are left without support, having been encouraged to deregister children from schools while waiting for an alternative placement.

Exploring home education

Sometimes, children proposed home education; one study participant whose daughter did this said, ‘I knew something had to change so I agreed to trial it.’ Others described sleepless nights and weeks, or even months, spent researching before undertaking home education, having – they felt – exhausted the avenues available to them in their efforts to secure support for their children.

Parents and schools

Tensions in parent-school relationships are nothing new. Nevertheless, perhaps previous generations of parents did not have comparable access to information regarding their children’s educational rights, or to local and national groups of other families. Participants, including those who never enrolled their children at school, considered a range of networks – frequently found online – to have supported their transition to home education.

Most participants had not previously known about or considered home education, one even suggested it was ‘secretive’. Such mystery seemed to also exist in schools, where teachers were not always informed that children had been deregistered. Perhaps the current discussion around rises in home education will start to demystify the practice.