Reluctant Home Education - a plea for local action

Image from Unsplash by Riccardo Annandale

Everywhere I go within the education system at the moment everyone is talking about the dramatic rise in the number of children being electively home educated. (EHE).

Home education is a parent or carer's right and there are strong and active home-education communities. That is good and right.

I am, however, meeting lots of families and children who are choosing home education reluctantly. This is often, but not only, due to the threat of fines or legal action due to non-attendance. The lack of attendance is often due to mental health needs or unsupported special educational needs. It seems to be most prevalent in secondary education.

There is an active and emotional debate about the causes of this - a lack of inclusive child-centred practice in schools, the effects of the pandemic and complex societal and family issues.

My concern is practical. I do worry about the causes of this, but I am most interested in solutions. Education matters and it is often challenging to provide, So what support do the families need? Some families, however reluctantly, have the resources, knowledge and time to access the many private educational services available online and elsewhere. Many families that I encounter do not.

I live in South Ribble in Lancashire and have lived here for nearly 30 years. Using publicly available information I can establish that the number of children home educated in the Lancashire County Council area (not including Blackpool and Blackburn with Darwen) rose from 618 in 2020 to at least 1653 in 2024. All indicators show that the numbers are still rising fast. Figures for South Ribble are not available publicly but around 8% of the population of Lancashire lives in South Ribble so a reasonable estimate is that somewhere between 100 and 200 children in my local area are home educated. How many are "reluctantly" or "un-electively" home educated is not known, but my intelligent guess is that it is going to be a lot!

in my local area, South Ribble, we therefore need some kind of flexible learning hub where families who are reluctantly home educating can access resources, workshops, provision, groups and advice. in my view there needs to be some involvement from the mainstream schools and flexi-schooling looks like being a significant part of the way forward for many children. There appears to be a very small number of examples of this type of provision across the country - Streams Learning Hub in Bristol, for example, say "We are not a school, nor do we intend to be one.​ Our part-time learning community is for teenagers not in school."

So - action needed, please...

• If someone is providing this service then please say so, but I can't see it anywhere at the moment;

• If you know of other examples of this provision for reluctantly home-educating families nationally then please let me know;

• Please respond to this, wherever you find the post, to say whether such provision is needed for reluctantly home educating families, whether I have got this all wrong, or whether this is something that you could support.

  
  

Thank you.

James Harris

james@findingcommonground.org.uk