Alan Smithers: Home education's time may have come

Emotions can run high in education. Lately my in-tray has been enlivened by some passionate dissent. One email said: "Many of us are shocked at your fascist-like attitudes - do you even know what fascism means?" Another sent an article implying I was guilty of "a kind of treason".

Perhaps the mildest of them read: "I have to confess that I thought you were a self-styled professor, because a real one could not possibly hold such unbalanced views."

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Was it reaction to the highly critical report that we published recently on the diploma? No - this in fact has attracted widespread support. It is only the government that seems so steamed-up about it as to want to play the man rather than the ball. The outcry was in response to some remarks I had made about home education.

When asked about it, I offered a few thoughts on the point of school. Some compulsory education is necessary, I averred, to ensure that all young people have every opportunity to engage with the learning essential to give them a good start in life. If we require children to be in education we need to set out what they should do and check their progress. In schools, children can also learn to rub along with others and draw support from them when what they have to do is not fun but difficult or repetitive. While recognising that parents who wanted take on the enormous commitment of providing the education themselves should have the right to do so, I believe they are not necessarily always the best judges of what is good, educationally speaking, for their children.

The counter-arguments rained in. One parent who had educated his three children at home and was on the committee of a home education support charity wrote: "Home educated children are, by and large, better educated, more socially competent and more confident than their schooled contemporaries. The UK's schools, as a result of a long period of state interference, are an educational disaster area." An issue of the Journal of Personalised Education Now arrived with 30 statements on what's wrong with schools, ranging from destroying the enjoyment of learning, causing stress and disillusionment, to indoctrination into pecking orders and conformity. Many famous people who had been educated at home were cited, including Theodore Roosevelt, Bertrand Russell, Charlie Chaplin, Noel Coward, Yehudi Menuhin and Patrick Moore. The Queen was among them, hence the contrived link in which apparent disrespect for home education becomes treason.

Unsurprisingly, there was little mention of those who have suffered as a result of being hot-housed at home, like Sufiah Yusof, the poor girl who earned a place at Oxford aged 13, dropped out and was last reported working as a prostitute.

Remarkably little is known about the extent of home education in the UK. No special permission is needed and a government study concluded that the statistics are woefully incomplete. The best guess is that about 50,000, or about 1 in 200, children of school age are being home educated. The only check on quality seems to be informal inquiries by local authorities that can, in extremis, serve a school attendance order. But how many have been issued seems not to be recorded. Pointing to the need for greater accountability is where "fascism" came in.

Treason and fascism are way over the top, but home educators are on to something when, taking their lead from Winston Churchill, they suggest we ought to be alert to schools as agents of control. Compulsory schooling was introduced in 1876 not primarily for the benefit of young people, but because with the curtailment of juvenile labour too many were making a nuisance of themselves on the streets. In an echo of the 19th century, the Brown government is legislating to extend the period of compulsion to age 18, mainly to deal with those not in education, employment or training.

You can have too much of a good thing. If the education that society insists upon means anything at all it will have enabled young people to discover what they like doing and what they are good at. By 16, if not earlier, they should be free to make up their own minds. We should not be criminalising those who do not wish to remain at school and find the government-imposed alternatives unacceptable.

Home education's time, therefore, may have come. It is specifically listed as an accepted method of full-time education up to age 18 and it is exempted from the requirement to be following a curriculum leading to a recognised qualification. As well as the growing numbers claimed by home education enthusiasts, its ranks could thus be swelled by those wishing to escape the government's impositions on 16 to 18 year-olds.

The writer is professor and director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at the University of Buckingham