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1 Introduction
In 2015 and 2016 Michael Wilshaw, then Head of OFSTED1 and HM Chief Inspector of Schools in the UK wrote on repeated occasions to the Secretary of State for Education describing his extreme concern for the safe-guarding of children who were being home educated in England (Ofsted, 2015a, 2015b, 2015c, 2016). He identified two main risks in relation to home-educated children: the first being the failure of the state to guarantee childrenâs safety and the second, related to the first, was the failure of local authorities to monitor what happens to children after they are withdrawn from school. Whilst many other different risks are often identified in relation to home-educated children such as specific concerns about the quality of education children receive and their wider socialization, these two key concerns are almost always central to narratives around home education and home educators. They are underpinned by fundamental fears for the vulnerability of young people and fears about the vulnerability of society more generally. If education is a social process producing citizens cognizant and generally supportive of national political customs and conventions (as for example suggested in the UKâs statutory guidance on teaching citizenship within the National Curriculum (DfE, 2013b)), it requires the process to be monitored, regulated and designed to give assurance about the type of citizen that is being produced and the continued safety and security of all citizens.
Michael Wilshawâs identification of child safety and the importance of monitoring are not new ideas. In the UK they were at the heart of recommendations from the earlier Badman Review (2009), the governmentâs most thorough review of home education in the UK to date. They are also at the heart of concerns identified in other European countries (United Nations, 1989) and in the United States (NCLB, 2001). What was new in Michael Wilshawâs letter was that home education was being identified in the very specific circumstances of Muslim familiesâ choices. Behind the general concerns of safety and invisibility was another more unsettling but less easily defined concern: one that tapped into fears generated on a global scale rather than the local concerns of local authorities. Some Muslim families it was argued were using home education as a âcoverâ to radicalise their children and to promote a programme of narrow, Islamic indoctrination. Home education was suddenly not just the contested ground in which childrenâs safety and childrenâs rights were at stake, but was now a much wider field in which national identity was being shaped. This is unsurprising. Education has always been a part of national political identity formation and never an added extra. Situating citizenship within post-war Britain, T.H. Marshall (1990) makes a clear argument that it is the duty of citizens to be educated not a right to receive an education; education shapes and moulds the type of people we want in our society. Diane Reay (2017: 11) suggests more problematically this is a âsystem that mirrors and reproducesâ already existing âhierarchical class relationships in wider societyâ. The process of creating citizens maintains a stasis: one in which social stability maybe prioritised but in which existing inequalities remain unchallenged and taken for granted. Home education potentially challenges the state and its citizens by allowing families to veer away from directly fulfilling their duties as citizens along predetermined routes and instead making more personal choices for their children.
This book is interested in how decisions to home educate are entangled within contested discourses often shaped by ethnicity, religion or cultural affiliations. The suspicion generated around Muslim home educators was predictable because it materialised around both a contested discourse (home education) and a minority community (Muslims) associated with alien values to the majority population. Turning our perspective 180 degrees, for minority communities mainstream schooling is often highly problematic because education, and schooling in particular, is designed to fulfil the needs of the majority. If attending school is closely linked to the duty element of citizenship, it may reasonably be associated with a means of producing a homogenous body of citizens; in doing so, it may challenge or run counter to the heterogeneous values of different families. This is one of the main reasons home education is often a strategy deployed by marginal groups in society. There is a growing body of evidence both from the United States (Fields-Smith and Williams, 2009); Mazama and Musumunu, 2014) and the UK (Bhopal and Myers, 2016) that for such families home education is often a strategy to counter racism, oppression or inequity in schools. The withdrawal of their children from schools, however, is likely to be regarded more widely as evidence of self-exclusion rather than evidence of schools and societyâs failing to meet their specific needs.
In many respects there is an inevitability that home education should be regarded with suspicion. In many societies the struggle for social justice is closely aligned to the struggle to acquire basic human rights â for example, the right to food and shelter so as not to be hungry and at the mercy of the elements; or the right to work rather than to be enslaved; or the right to exercise free political thought and action rather than being subservient to dictators or tyrants. Amongst such basic rights, and despite Marshallâs (1990) suggestion education is simply a duty and not a right, the right to an education, to attend school independently and free of economic or cultural barriers has enormous global currency enshrined in Article 28 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (United Nations, 1989). Home education is in many ways the epitome of a denial of a basic right; the childâs right to attend school is taken away and their opportunities limited to an education shaped by their parents.
If we return to Michael Wilshawâs advice to the Secretary of State for education, we might anticipate that such a strongly worded document would result in action. The anticipation might be for greater state intervention to ensure fewer unaccounted-for children in the education system, but this has not been the case at all. In England, as in many parts of Europe and North America, there has been a significant rise in the numbers of parents who decide to home educate their children (Webb, 2010; Winstanley, 2013). This trend has not been met by increased state legislation and the reasons for this are perhaps entrenched within other narratives about home education.
Minority communities are not the only home educators. Home education is a choice made by many more typical families; the US Department for Education in its statistical survey found that âmost homeschooled students were White (83 percent) and nonpoor (89 percent)â (NCES, 2016). Often families with access to substantial economic, social and cultural capital, who want something better for their children, than what they feel is on offer from schools and the state, will make alternative provision for their childrenâs education. Whilst more typically families with greater economic capital might choose an independent school, and in doing so, their childrenâs education may improve dramatically whilst still remaining within the state monitoring of OFSTED or similar national monitoring bodies; for other families this is neither an option nor their best option. Some families identify failings in schools generally and missing elements in their family lives that they can change (Murphy, 2012). Such narratives are often shaped in terms of being a better family and spending time together. Not just providing better educational opportunities for children but more importantly shaping the type of family they want to be. In many respects this is a narrative that mirrors or responds directly to current neo-liberal trends towards a more marketised education system. It is a narrative in which risks are identified within the provision of schooling and education and families make choices about how they will manage those risks. In these narratives, such families are perhaps more readily identifiable as being responsible global citizens adapting to political and economic change in ways that are determined by rational decision-making in a rapidly changing world. The perception of other families, such as those from minority backgrounds or those with deeply held traditional beliefs, may be that they are somehow behaving less responsibly. The choices made by these families might be understood more easily as a failure to engage with a bright cosmopolitan future and, rather than embracing opportunity, fearing its consequences. In a fast-moving world the fear of being consumed within homogenous values and belief systems may become contextualised as being parochial, outdated and putting children at risk.
Home education is a context in which risk is perceived by individuals, communities and the state; and also a context in which these risks are managed by the same actors. This book explores the experiences and perceptions of different types of families who choose to manage risks they identify in their childrenâs lives by home educating. There is an inevitable ambiguity at play within the perception of risk which to some extent can be understood within Ulrich Beckâs account of Risk Society (1992, 2006). For Beck the distribution of risks in late modernity crosses national borders, but is managed at a very local level by individuals to shape their own lives. For home educators, risk maybe perceived in different ways: as failing schools, as cultural assimilation or as missed opportunities. However, the management of such risk is often felt to be the responsibility of the individual or the family. Home education meanwhile, is also often described in terms of being a risk in and of itself: to child safety, to child development and as a risk to the wider interests of society. The management of such risk however, does not lie with the family; it falls within a socio-political sphere in which the state enacts policies that are perceived as maintaining the rights and duties of all its citizens. In this discourse home education is a site in which there is an inevitable tension between individual, community, national and global interests. By exploring the experiences of many different groups of home educators, this book unpicks how such tensions are managed and the implications for education policy making.
Chapter outline and structure
At the heart of this book are accounts of home education by home educators. This book draws on 33 case studies with families who were home educating in England. We particularly identified certain family types in order to explore different experiences of home education, including 6 families who identified as being Muslim, 6 as being both White and middle class, 4 as Evangelical Christians, 4 families whose children had special educational needs related to disability, 8 Gypsy and Traveller and 5 Black families. Within these characteristics there were also multiple crossovers of similarly shared traits; some Black and Muslim families for example identified as being middle class and other families had strong religious beliefs.
We decided to use case study methods for our study as we were particularly interested in exploring the reasons why families chose to home educate. We wanted to gain a detailed understanding and analysis of why parents made this decision, particularly in relation to the positive and negative factors associated with making this decision. We wanted to provide a detailed examination of a key issue over a period of time (Hartley, 2004; Yin, 2003).
Families were accessed via specific home education organisations; this was based on contacting the organisations to arrange for adverts to be posted on their web pages asking families to participate in the research. We also contacted other organisations asking them to put us in touch with families who were home educating. After our initial contact with families, we used a snowball sample and asked respondents if they knew of other families who may be interested in participating in the study. Once we had made the initial contact, at least one parent from each family was interviewed on two separate occasions. Ethical clearance was obtained from the University of Southampton and all interview questions were piloted.
We digitally recorded and later transcribed all of the interviews. The data was analysed via an iterative process through the development of different categories where we explored different behaviours and patterns of the families and their reasons and experiences of home educating. In order to ensure accuracy and enhance validity we cross-checked our key themes and categories. We specifically organised the data based on our key research questions and our data analysis was based on âexamining, categorising, tabulating and testingâ (Yin, 2003: 109). We wanted to examine specific patterns in the data in order to understand the meanings respondents gave to particular events and experiences (Neuman, 1997). Our process of data analysis consisted of three stages: drawing on theoretical propositions, exploring different explanations of these and developing descriptions of each of the cases (Yin, 2003).
The study explored how and why home education is accessed by different social groups; and secondly, how these different groups are perceived as home educators. The families in this research were, with hindsight, predictably diverse, vocal, engaged and engaging. They did not share any set of views about home education. Not only did they not have a shared understanding about how best to deliver a home education; they also did not universally agree home education was an effective means of educating children or even a âgood thingâ per se. Within each chapter we have presented detailed accounts of two families drawn from the wider research, with similar backgrounds or reasons for choosing to home educate, but accounts that allow for a discussion of the diversity and multiplicity of viewpoints the research uncovered. To reiterate at this point, the intention of presenting contradictory accounts is not to suggest there is a right or wrong way for families to conduct themselves, rather it is intended to highlight the heterogeneity of experience. Having underlined the message of difference, it should also be noted that many similarities emerged. Some of these might be easily anticipated such as the similarity of some middle-class experience despite differences of ethnicity and religious affiliation. Others might be more surprising such as the similarities between some Gypsy family accounts and some families whose decision to home educate related to their religious background. We have also included a family who gave serious consideration to home education, but who decided eventually not to home educate, (though they did access some alternative educational provision). The decision not to home educate is of course as important as the decision to home educate: possibly what is really explored in the accounts given by many of these families are the fault-lines within state education which are readily apparent but with which many other families choose to live.
Following the introduction, Chapter 2, Global perspectives of home education, includes an overview of different types of home education, of the regulatory frameworks that characterise UK and United States educational policy and contextual detail on how home education operates in different social and political contexts. The chapter will draw on previous literature that has explored home education and provide a critical analysis of the debates and issues these foster. It will discuss how such debates are situated within the wider context of education, including globalised understandings such as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Chapter 3, Situating home education in global education economies, will provide a theoretical understanding of how risk might be understood in relation to home education. By drawing on the work of Ulrich Beck (1992), the chapter will explore the positioning of families who choose home education and how this is affected by race and ethnicity, class, disability and religion. The chapter will discuss how a consequence of the moral panic surrounding home education in the UK characterises it as a source of considerable âriskâ in childrenâs lives, particularly in relation to marginal or non-mainstream families (Beck, 1992). It will make a central argument that in societies that become more cosmopolitan (Beck, 2006), the positioning of certain groups, particularly more marginalised communities or groups who are disengaged from the mainstream, become further side-lined. In the context of home educators, their choices become identified with introducing risk into their childrenâs lives. This is ironic on a number of levels, not least because the more marginalised home educators in our research tended to be the families faced with more pressing risks in their childrenâs lives. More mainstream families were more likely to be considered as making strategic or âlifestyleâ choices to manage the ârisksâ they faced.
Chapter 4, Middle-class families: âour children do better at homeâ, explores the experiences of middle-class families who have chosen home education for their children. It will draw upon the accounts of two families who defined themselves as middle class and who chose home education. Both families highlighted issues that perhaps are common to many home educators; they were dissatisfied with local schools and felt they could provide a better alternative. However, their accounts also identify other motivations often focused on the type of family experience they wanted their children to experience and a sense that the parentâs lifestyle could also be improved. This chapter also discusses the deployment of economic, social and cultural capital by middle-class families.
Chapter 5, Gypsies and Travellers: âwe have always educated our children at homeâ, focuses on the experiences of Gypsy families for whom home education is often considered a traditional or normal route to acquiring an education. It specifically examines the experiences of such families in relation to the cultural norms and values of Gypsy and Traveller communities. It explores the discourses by which home education is negotiated in relation to schooling, and how Gypsies, who are already positioned as a marginalised group, maybe identified as further excluding themselves in the process of choosing home education (unlike the middle-class families discussed in the preceding chapter).
Chapter 6, Religion: âwe want our children to learn specific valuesâ, explores the experiences of an evangelical Christian and a Muslim family who chose to home educate. In part for both families this was a means of delivering an education that promoted their cultural values and more widely maintained and developed bonding social capital within their communities. Both families felt to a greater or lesser extent their religion identified their children as being different in mainstream schools, (and for one family was a direct source of racism). The chapter discusses how the implications of such an education may work to exclude these children from becoming full citizens in society.
Chapter 7, Special educational needs and disability: âmost schools do not want, and never have wanted, our childrenâ, highlights the concerns of families whose children have special needs or disabilities for whom home education has often represented an alternative to state schooling. The two families in this chapter provide some rich insights into some of the reasons home education is more widely seen to be attractive, including the identification of the importance of the âhomeâ in home education. The two families in this chapter both identified special needs related to their childrenâs disabilities and their accounts of home education related directly to their childrenâs needs. More generally a constant feature in our research was familyâs identification of their child as âspecialâ. The connection between the intimacy of the home, of the importance of family and the provision of tailored education are discussed in detail.
Chapter 8, Race and ethnicity: local, global or cosmopolitan identities? is the final findings chapter and in many respects it brings together the themes raised in earlier chapters including dissatisfaction with schools, experiences of racism, difference and the desire for children to have secure and successful futures. It describes the experiences and choices of two Black families living in London. For these families very specific...
