Home Schooling - are you for or against?

I am not a teacher but I have worked in a lot of schools and early years settings as an outsider. Obviously I only have seen a sample of schools across the country but I think the difference between good and outstanding is often highly debatable and has often caused me to raise my eyebrow so to speak. On the other hand I have never been in a setting that has received a grading of below good that has caused me any surprise.
I worked as a manager in social care and whilst inspections are by their nature stressful I had only good experience with regard to my relationships with inspectors.

There's an awful lot to discuss here but I'll add my experience. I have a DS who was out of school after the age of 13. He was a "disruptive" bright child in a very good school, severely dyslexic with a sense of humour that upset many. He has gone on to achieve and has an MA. So it is possible to achieve academic qualifications without the GCSE, A level route. Mind I think my home schooling was mostly about allowing him to explore the things he was interested in and trying to find resources and places that supported him.

The issue of how much time is spent teaching in schools is so different. I did supply in primary schools for a long time. There were schools I could walk in, know I would have a lesson plan left, and the class would just get on with the work. There were others where if I could just stay through the day, keep the children reasonably under control and not running riot, I was regarded as successful, getting work out of them was a welcome bonus. The complete disparity between schools working in innercity areas and those in middle class suburbs is extraordinary. In deprived areas staff cope well with real problems and problem children and I learned some of my best coping strategies from those people who tried desperately to keep children who were disruptive in school.

This disparity only deepens in secondary schools, where staff have another problem, maintaining the school's achievement levels and keeping the cleverest on track. Not surprisingly exclusion is a sort of solution. The situation is getting worse as most schools are now cutting the support staff who were there to keep children in school.

So I think there are children who could be better out of school and may do very well being home schooled. That might be very different if schools were properly funded and education was returned to a situation where we stopped counting bits of paper as a mark of educational success and started looking at the child's needs first.

Ellianne - Ofsted inspections are hated because they are data-based. They will tell you there is more to it than that, but the truth is that you need to have the "right" data to wave under the inspector's nose. As to the happy pupils, the extensive extra-curricular activities, the breadth of the curriculum that expands from the government-dictated shackles - none of this matters as long as the data pass muster.

The data can pass muster if we can prove that 8 year olds can identify a "fronted adverbial" - what nonsense.

If you ask the parents of the children at the school where I am governor why they send them there, they will not even mention data. A school can go down an Ofsted grade for poor attendance - in a tiny rural school where a bug did the rounds and laid them all flat for weeks, resulting in the attendance data going down - apparently we should have waved a magic wand and told the bug to go away!

Luckygirl. Good post !

I’m a languages teacher and can honestly say until grandchildren started school I’d never heard of a fronted adverbial.

The silly thing is that when they come to secondary school and start MFL you are hard pushed to get them to correctly identify verb, noun, adjective ! Possibly because they’ve hard too many other complications thrown at them!

Ellianne

Why is it Ofsted inspections are so feared, dreaded and hated? What are they doing wrong?
My husband is an inspector and enters schools with the premise that the inspectors are there to advise and to sometimes suggest changes for the better.

I think possibly because of the rigidity of approach? Each lesson must contain certain elements otherwise you are clearly not a good teacher. And those certain elements were different say five years ago and will be different again soon. Plus your lesson plan must be written in a particular way, with a lot of the latest methodological jargon. I know I did good lessons but I struggled with talking the talk !

I don’t think they teach anything about grammar at all here. I doubt that many could separate a verb from a noun. They are, however, extremely creative compared with how we used to be and have a much broader knowledge. Broad and shallow but maybe that’s better for the future. Very different from anything I remember.

Lucca

Luckygirl. Good post !

I’m a languages teacher and can honestly say until grandchildren started school I’d never heard of a fronted adverbial.

The silly thing is that when they come to secondary school and start MFL you are hard pushed to get them to correctly identify verb, noun, adjective ! Possibly because they’ve hard too many other complications thrown at them!

Same here! Most experts in English grammar hadn't heard of them either. Adverbs and adverbial clauses matter in German because they affect the word order of a sentence, but I can honestly say that I had never heard of them in English. Even now, I don't refer to them as "fronted adverbials" when I'm teaching German grammar.

The first time I heard of them was when I did some training to be a one-to-one "catch up" tutor for English.

I think it depends on the children and on the family. I recently watched an episode of, I think it was called A New Life in the Country. A couple were moving from Surrey to, I think, Wales. They had nine children, the Mum home schooled all of them - and she had a baby. She looked happy, relaxed, well dressed and attractive. Ditto the children who were lovely - they seemed very happy, well behaved, interested in their learning and articulate. I couldn't imagine how she did it but it obviously worked for them.

Just trying to oversee my grandchildren doing their class lessons online and trying to encourage them to do the following tasks based on the lesson has been difficult for me. Perhaps having several children makes things easier.

The grammar that young children learn in schools is quite advanced. I hadn't heard of half the things they are learning. I can see the benefit of being able to name parts of speech - particularly in relation to learning other languages - but it all seems rather mechanical to me. I worry that it may impede creativity and the pure joy of just getting your thoughts and observations down on paper.

Ellianne

Why is it Ofsted inspections are so feared, dreaded and hated? What are they doing wrong?
My husband is an inspector and enters schools with the premise that the inspectors are there to advise and to sometimes suggest changes for the better.

Ahem! Ofsted aren't officially supposed to advise. They're not supposed to have a fixed idea of what a "good school" is, although many do. They're supposed to judge a school against a set list of criteria and that's it. There's supposed to be a clear difference between an inspector and an advisor.

My daughter's first job after uni was in Ofsted's HR department at a time when Ofsted was "spring cleaning" its own list of inspectors and bringing the whole operation back in-house after it had been outsourced. A surprising number of Ofsted inspectors had had virtually no classroom or school management experience. Ofsted also had a list of "black sheep" inspectors who had a number of complaints logged against them.

I knew (still do come across occasionally) one of the people whom Ofsted relieved of inspections. He was outraged and I had a very difficult job keeping my mouth shut because I knew very well whose desk his application would have passed over. (I always did think he was a pompous, self-opinionated [four letter word].)

Eloethan

The grammar that young children learn in schools is quite advanced. I hadn't heard of half the things they are learning. I can see the benefit of being able to name parts of speech - particularly in relation to learning other languages - but it all seems rather mechanical to me. I worry that it may impede creativity and the pure joy of just getting your thoughts and observations down on paper.

Maybe, but the trouble is that when they go to secondary school, they seem to have forgotten everything. It was my experience that common terms such as noun, verb and adjective needed to be taught again because they weren't understood - and that was after the primary school curriculum was supposed to be improved.

I’ve worked in primary and secondary schools. I’ve worked in one inner city and two in leafy areas. The inner city echoes that of a previous poster where crowd control and preventing them leaping on desks and seats was classed as a successful lesson. Being matey with the kids meant they liked you, your lesson passed off ok. Did they learn anything? Unlikely. The more able kids were definitely short changed. As others have said, the experience in better areas is completely different. If I had children who had to go to a school like the first one, with all the likely outcomes of that, I wouldn’t hesitate to attempt home schooling. Plus, a lot of what is in lessons these days is irrelevant to those kids who are not academic but would excel in vocational education. One size doesn’t fit all.

This is one of the most interesting threads I’ve read in a while. So many posts discussing this the issues facing schools, the impact of the obsession with grades and poverty of experience impacting on behaviour.
The impact of Gove/frontal Adverbials continues and not in a positive way.
One of my daughters taught in the kind of schools my work took me into, areas of high deprivation / substance misuse/ crime/ violence etc. Children who were. Rey tired, hungry and often traumatised. Ofsted make no allowances do they, neither do grades

The teaching of grammar in English was massively ramped up due to the requirements of Michael Gove (I forget precisely which year it was). He had imparted this info to the exam boards BUT it wasn't passed on to schools. So the first year after the changes were made, the exam papers and questions LOOKED the same, but were graded completely differently. So many good students got much lower grades in GCSE English. So much so that my school got me to do a piece of action research into it.

The outcome in my school was that we changed our English curriculum from virtually no grammar teaching to being heavy in grammar.

I have read SO many complaints about fronted adverbials by the way. It is JUST putting the adverb before the verb.

So instead of 'They ran quickly' the sentence changes to 'They quickly ran'.

Aha! Well, I wouldn't score well in my SATs because I thought it was putting an adverb or adverbial phrase at the beginning of a sentence, such as "Running quickly, he headed towards home."

Here we go:

www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/zwwp8mn/articles/zp937p3#:~:text=A%20fronted%20adverbial%20is%20when,the%20sentence%2C%20before%20the%20verb.

(Fronted adverbials for Dummies aka anybody over the age of about 20.)

And now I know what an expanded noun phrase is too:

www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/zwwp8mn/articles/z3nfw6f

I think all the new terms like fronted adverbial, clerihew, etc. were invented by someone in a ‘management of change’ job, i.e. if they don’t change anything they are not doing a good job!
We have to teach and reteach nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and prepositions every year up to Y6, never mind all the other terms and they still don’t all remember them.
We used to chant things like, ‘a noun is a naming word, a verb is a doing word, an adjective describes a noun and an adverb modifies a verb or adjective’ when I was at school.
With regards to supply teachers, if I know I’m out, I’ll leave a lesson plan. If it’s an unexpected absence there’s an overall plan for the half term in staff-share and another member of staff to ask, not forgetting my super TA!

Against it. My 4 youngest grandchildren are the only ones at school now and they need to go back. Not just for the education they receive from trained teachers who are focusing on lessons and not trying to do another full time job alongside and also keeping a house clean etc. but for the routine and most definitely their friends. adaunas Your fronted adverbial resonated with me! I also found maths methods have changed considerably. Helping my 7 year old GD with multiplication was an eye-opener. Gone are the days when times tables were used for this. She has a method of drawing boxes then filling them with numbers and crosses???!!! Like you I was brought up chanting times tables and at 73 I can still recall them easily. Ofsted would go weak at the knees with that method these days.

Thank you for the explanations about and feelings towards Ofsted inspections. I specifically said Ofsted because my husband is an independent schools' inspector and I acknowledge there are big differences. The obsession with grades is rife here too, but big opportunities are made for the less academic kids to succeed in other areas like the arts and sport. This possibly makes it seem that every child is achieving in their own way, so tick box happy. The one size fits all model of the state system doesn't exist in the same way. I assume this is also true of home schooling where many of you have said lessons can be adapted to the child's interests and preferences. There are certain parallels here

growstuff - 10 out of 10!
e.g. Tearing her hair out, the poor teacher was driven round the bend.

GagaJo - sorry, but your school has just been downgraded!

LOL, terrible!

I wonder if that's the difference with my experience Elliane, the focus for social care residential inspection was certainly quite broad, very much about the childrens experiences and perceptions.

Luckygirl

growstuff - 10 out of 10!
e.g. Tearing her hair out, the poor teacher was driven round the bend.

GagaJo - sorry, but your school has just been downgraded!

Excellent example of a passive there too Luckygirl!

Quite possibly Galaxy. Maybe the focus is on the all round education.