Wednesday 3 February 2010

Ludicrous home education propaganda

Everywhere I look lately - on emails, websites, posters, even postcards - I seem to be seeing the text below;

Every Child Matters?
Each week: 450,000 children are bullied in school.
Each year: more than 360,000 children injured in schools
Each year: at least 16 children commit suicide as a result of schoolbullying
Each year: an estimated 1 million children truant
Each year: more than 1 in 6 children leave school unable to read, write or add up

Although primarily designed to draw attention to the problem of bullying, this has now been adopted by many home educators. This is so completely mad, that it is hard to know where to begin. For one thing, these figures are a greater condemnation of home education than they are of schools. Let me explain.

Looking first at the statistic that one in six children leave school unable to read write and add up; this is a quotation from a speech made by David Cameron on December 6th 2006. The figures relate to GCSE passes, not the measure of education usually favoured by home educators! Do home educators really believe that a child who has not taken and passed GCSEs in English and Mathematics by the age of sixteen is unable to read, write and add up? I rather suspect that the relevant figure among home educated children would be considerably higher than one in six. I have met a number of home educated teenagers who have not taken GCSEs in these subjects. Is it really true that they were unable to read and write? One doubts it.

Looking now at the claim that 360,000 children are injured each year in schools. This is almost true, but horribly misleading. The figure is from 2002 and relates to children aged between five and fourteen. I really think that it is about time that more up to date statistics were used. In that same year 2002, 900,000, that is to say almost one million children in the five to fourteen age bracket, were injured so badly at home that they required hospital treatment. The situation for younger children was even worse. Almost a quarter of a million falls in the home by children under five were bad enough to require hospital treatment - a horrifying indictment of the standards of care in ordinary homes! Another 26,000 children under five were treated in hospital for poisoning. These figures are shocking and suggest strongly that children are safer in schools and nurseries than they are at home with their parents.

One million children do not truant each year! There are no figures for truancy. These statistics relate to unauthorised absences from school. As truancy patrols have found again and again, the majority of children taking such unauthorised absences are with their parents; shopping trips, days out, holidays and so on. A two week holiday in term time would account for twenty unauthorised half days of absence from school. Again, do home educators really think that a child would be better off and learning more at school than he would be on holiday or even having a day out with his family? You would think then that they would all rush to enroll their kids at the local school!

I do not think it at all wise for home educating parents to spread this sort of nonsense. A number of local authority officers known to me have been laughing about this and poking even more holes in the thing than I have. There are many good reasons for choosing to educate one's own children at home; none of the figures in this text provide a sound justification for doing so. Taking the figures at face value, home educated children are even worse off than those at school.

26 comments:

  1. I like to leave trying to back things up with flawed statistics to the DCSF, since it's what they do best.

    However, I think you're wrong about Cameron's speech relating to GCSE passes. The figures, whether indicative of anything or not, come from this DCSF research.

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  2. Yes, I know about this research. It concerns adults aged between sixteen and sixty five. The poster I reproduce above talks of children leaving school each year; in other words the current situation. A sixty four year old man's literacy skills tell us little about modern schools.

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  3. The figures are all broken down by age group in that document, and seem to support the claim you're disputing. Either way it's nothing to do with GCSE passes, which was the only point I was making.

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  4. Possibly, although the one in six figure ties in with the GCSEs. Even looking at the survey you mention, those attaining entry level 3 are still able to read simple texts and so on. These would include many of the one in six who are supposedly unable to read. Either way, I don't believe that this figure of one in six actually says anything about the literacy of school leavers.

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  5. "Although primarily designed to draw attention to the problem of bullying, this has now been adopted by many home educators."

    Why do you say this, the figures were compiled by home educators in Feb 2007?

    "Looking first at the statistic that one in six children leave school unable to read write and add up; this is a quotation from a speech made by David Cameron on December 6th 2006. The figures relate to GCSE passes, not the measure of education usually favoured by home educators!"

    I think the figures were taken from the national reading tests, but even it's from GCSE, GCSEs are the chosen method of testing by the system and the system is aimed at children taking and passing GCSEs. It is a measure of the success of the system because that is the target of the system. The statistic is used to make the point that, using their own targets and measures they are failing 1 in 6 children. The same measure cannot be used over all home educators because many do not all aim for GCSEs. To compare like with like you would have to look at the sub-set of home educators who are aiming for GCSEs.

    "Looking now at the claim that 360,000 children are injured each year in schools. This is almost true, but horribly misleading. The figure is from 2002 and relates to children aged between five and fourteen. I really think that it is about time that more up to date statistics were used. In that same year 2002, 900,000, that is to say almost one million children in the five to fourteen age bracket, were injured so badly at home that they required hospital treatment."

    Again you are not comparing like with like. Children spend about 10% of their time (out of a year) in school but (if you add the two sets of injuries together) this small amount of time accounts for 29% of the injuries. Consider also that children are likely to be doing more dangerous tasks at home such has cooking, climbing, etc. than when they are at school where the majority of the time they are likely to be sat at a desk.

    "These would include many of the one in six who are supposedly unable to read."

    I think it's generally accepted that this refers to functional literacy but maybe it would be better to include that word to make it more accurate. Sometimes attempts to keep phrases short can distort the information, especially if misunderstandings like yours are likely.

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  6. "One million children do not truant each year! There are no figures for truancy. These statistics relate to unauthorised absences from school."

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/sep/22/schools.pupilbehaviour

    One pupil in five plays truant, new figures show

    "Nearly 1.4 million children played truant from school last year, well up on a decade ago despite repeated government drives to improve attendance, including forcing parents to do more to make sure their offspring turn up at classes.

    One in five of all pupils in England missed days without permission, with truants in primary schools on average missing the equivalent of four days of education a year and those in secondary schools absent for seven days, the government revealed yesterday.

    ...The Department for Education and Skills said that although more children played truant, they did so for shorter periods - the average time lost to unauthorised absence per truant in 1997 was two weeks. It preferred to measure the problem in terms of half-day sessions missed."

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  7. Your figures are decidedly odd. You claim that children spend 10% of their time in school, but this is ridiculous. If we make a fairly safe assumption that most accidents to children happen while they are awake rather than asleep, then the figures look like this. Allowing ten hours sleep per day would give us 5110 waking hours per child. Each would spend about 1200 hours of that time in school, which amounts to 25%, rather than 10%. The point I was making was that homes are very dangerous places for all age groups. To pretend that schools are more dangerous is crazy

    I have no idea at all what proportion of children leave school unable to add up and neither does anybody else. What grounds do we have for supposing that the proportion is higher for school children than it is for home educated children?

    "Each year: at least 16 children commit suicide as a result of schoolbullying"

    Causes of suicide are not decided at coroners' courts. Where does this figure come from? Newspaper reports? Suicides often have many bad things going on in their lives, who is deciding here that these suicides were "a result of school bullying"?


    There is no generally accepted definition of bullying in this country. Where does the figure of 450,000 come from?

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  8. "Either way, I don't believe that this figure of one in six actually says anything about the literacy of school leavers."

    http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/research/data/uploadfiles/RR490.pdf

    A chart on page 49 of this report shows that 16% of 16-19 year olds were at entry level 3 or below in literacy tests, approximately 1 in 6 and the numeracy chart on page 50 shows that 50% are at level 3 or below. The literacy and numeracy tests classified at Levels and were broadly comparable in technical demand to aspects of GCSE English and Maths so 1 in 6 16-19 year olds are below GCSE level for literacy and 50% are below GCSE level for numeracy.

    BTW, I was wrong about functional literacy. They could functional literacy and numeracy as entry level 1 or below in this report.

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  9. The gist of the poster which I reproduced above was that things were pretty bad for children at school. One of the things which was bad was that one in six were apparently unable to read, write or add up. This is not so, but let us assume that it is. What evidence is there that children who are not at school are doing any better than this?

    Truancy is used as shorthand for children who are absent from school without authority. The figures relate to unauthorised absences. As I said, truancy patrols find that the majority of these are with parental consent. Do the people who composed this poster really think that such children would have been better off in school? Might there not be a lot of what Roland Meighan calls "purposive conversation" taking place between parents and children on such occasions? Is it the contention that children are better off in school than with their parents? Very strange.

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  10. "Allowing ten hours sleep per day would give us 5110 waking hours per child. Each would spend about 1200 hours of that time in school, which amounts to 25%, rather than 10%.The point I was making was that homes are very dangerous places for all age groups. To pretend that schools are more dangerous is crazy"

    Ahh, my figures are wrong, sorry bout that, I had forgotten to account for sleep, though I don't think accidents at night are impossible, wouldn't injuries at home include house fires for example? but I make hours in school now to be around 1080 per year. Roughly 9am-3pm, 6 hours, 5 days a week for 36 weeks, but maybe they are at school for more than 36 weeks? Using these figures, 21% of the time in a supposedly safer environment (controlled by intelligent professionals, health and safety tested environment, less dangerous activities) accounts for 29% of children's injuries even if night time accidents and injuries are ignored. Sounds like, hour for hour, schools are more dangerous - this is true even using your figures so why is this crazy?

    "I have no idea at all what proportion of children leave school unable to add up and neither does anybody else. What grounds do we have for supposing that the proportion is higher for school children than it is for home educated children?"

    We know what proportion are at each level (entry level 1, 2 or 3, level 1 or 2). There probably are no grounds for supposing that the proportions are different for home educated children but I think it was intended to challenge the assumption at the time that school is better than home. If they don't know what levels are in home educated children and school levels are so poor anyway (so not difficult to equal or better), how have they reached their assumption?

    "Causes of suicide are not decided at coroners' courts. Where does this figure come from? Newspaper reports? Suicides often have many bad things going on in their lives, who is deciding here that these suicides were "a result of school bullying"?

    The figure was taken from the book, Bullycide - Death at playtime

    http://www.bullyonline.org/successunlimited/books/bullycid.htm

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  11. "Although primarily designed to draw attention to the problem of bullying, this has now been adopted by many home educators."

    This group of statistics was produced by home educators as part of the 'I'm an anomaly' campaign by Action for Home Education. The DfES contended that home education was an anomaly at odds with the Every Child Matters agenda. The complete text of the postcard/poster I've seen is:

    "DfES calls Home Education an “anomaly” not in line with
    the Every Child Matters agenda.

    Every Child Matters

    More than 360,000 children injured in schools each year
    450,000 children bullied in school last year
    At least 16 children commit suicide each year as a result of school bullying
    An estimated 1 million children truant every year
    Treasury statistics show more than 1 in 6 children leave school each year unable to read, write or add up
    Every Child Matters?
    Home Education
    because EACH child matters, individually"

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  12. Incidentally, the figures for bullying were wrong, it should have been '450,000 children bullied in school *every week*'

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/mortarboard/2007/mar/27/howcanschoolsreducebullyin

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  13. In all my life I have never read anything so absurd as the figures on bullying reported in the Guardian, to which Anonymous has provided a link above! These are based upon research by a charity called Beat bullying. Among other claims made are that two thirds of school children are bullied and that 42% of them truant as a result. This suggests that over a quarter of school children truant due to bullying. This does not tie in with any other figures seen anywhere else in the UK.

    The reason is not hard to discover. These findings are based upon a survey distributed online to 2592 victims of bullying! Obviously, if your sample is only taken from the victims of bullying, then the results will be skewed.

    I think we may safely disregard these statistics.

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  14. "I think we may safely disregard these statistics."

    Yet, you accept Badman's "statistics."

    Yet, you accept the Impact Assessments.

    In all my life, as a University trained statistician, I have never read anything so absurd as the Badman Report or the multiple evolving Impact Assessments prepared by this Government.

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  15. "Among other claims made are that two thirds of school children are bullied and that 42% of them truant as a result."

    Depends on what period of time this covers, do you have links to them? If two thirds of school children are bullied during their school years and 42% of them truant as a result at least once during their school years, this could fit with official figures that show that 20% of children truant in a single year.

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  16. Christine Oliver and Mano Candappa of the Thomas Coram Research Unit, Institute of Education conducted research for the DfES in 2003 and found that just over half (51%) of Year 5 pupils reported that they had been bullied during the term, compared with just over a quarter (28%) of Year 8 pupils. It seems likely that these were the highest and lowest school year figures though it doesn't state this.

    If these figures were repeated in subsequent terms but with some of the bullied becoming un-bullied and new children joining the bullied group, it doesn't seem impossible for the total for the year to approach two thirds of pupils and at least half seems very likely. Two thirds may be an overestimation because of a biased sample, but it doesn't sound inconsistent enough with other data to be called absurd.

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  17. "In all my life I have never read anything so absurd as the figures on bullying reported in the Guardian, to which Anonymous has provided a link above! These are based upon research by a charity called Beat bullying."

    According to the full research report (linked from this page, http://www.beatbullying.org/docs/resources/statistics.html) the 69% of children have been bullied figure came from Bullying UK (called Bullying Online at the time) who conducted a survey in 2006.

    http://www.bullying.co.uk/index.php/young-people/the-national-survey/

    "Bullying UK surveyed 8,574 children, parents, teachers and adults in the first six months of 2006 in the largest ever investigation into school bullying in the UK. The survey was widely publicised on national TV, radio and in newspapers as well as in young people's magazines and on youth, charity, police and council websites."

    4,772 pupils were included. It looks as though the 69% figure was for pupils who had ever been bullied at school, not just during the previous year. Although the survey was self selected, it sounds as though they attempted to recruit a wide range of children, attempting to persuade teachers to ask their whole class to respond for instance, not just those who had been bullied as Simon suggests (or the bullied figure would have been 100%). True, it's likely to be biased towards those who have been bullied, but then, most social research is self selected so I'm not sure what they could do to avoid this. However, it doesn't seem entirely unreasonable when viewed alongside the Oliver and Candappa research for the DfES.

    The figure of 42% for the percentage of bullied children and young people who truant comes from the Beat Bullying panel research 2006 and again this appears to be the percentage who have ever truanted from school because of bullying rather than those that have truanted in just the last year. Entirely consistent with official figures that show that 20% of children truant in a year.

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  18. None of these figures work. Anonymous, you say that according to official figures, 20% of children truant each year. According to the poster above, 1,000,000 children truant each year. There are 9,500,000 school children in the UK, 1000000 truants each year would give a rate of around 10%, not 20%.

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  19. More of the usual Simon Webb facile massaging of the evidence.

    For a start, you might like to consider that lots of kids are injured in school and sent home with a note that says that "little X was very brave..." ; the same magnitude of injury in the home would often lead to a concerned parent taking their child to A&E and then, lo and behold, there is a follow-up call from some non-medical social/welfare busybody to "check-up on little X" that ratchets-up the injury statistics for children in the home. School injury statistics are undoubtedly suppressed.

    If you disregard the harm that comes to children in school or other state care, then of course the parental home will look pretty bleak.

    As for GCSEs, don't get me started; they're largely a certificate to show that the child's brain has been addled and they're no longer capable of useful learning and problem solving. They might be good for recalling things that they've heard, or read on wikipedia, but that's about all. GCSEs do more brain damage than half a dozen rounds with Mike Tyson.

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  20. "None of these figures work. Anonymous, you say that according to official figures, 20% of children truant each year. According to the poster above, 1,000,000 children truant each year. There are 9,500,000 school children in the UK, 1000000 truants each year would give a rate of around 10%, not 20%."

    You are correct, the figure quoted in the poster is wrong - it's too low and should read 1,400,000. Maybe the 1,000,000 figure was pre 2005? Or possibly a later year and truancy improved drastically in between? I thought you were arguing that 1 million was too high a figure?

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/sep/22/schools.pupilbehaviour

    "Nearly 1.4 million children played truant from school last year, well up on a decade ago despite repeated government drives to improve attendance, including forcing parents to do more to make sure their offspring turn up at classes.

    One in five of all pupils in England missed days without permission, with truants in primary schools on average missing the equivalent of four days of education a year and those in secondary schools absent for seven days, the government revealed yesterday."

    If you check the data here, http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/rsgateway/DB/TIM/m002004/index.shtml you will find that the total number of children in State Primary and Secondary schools in 2005 is 7,520,910 (8,274,840 if you include Nursery and Independent Schools) and 1,400,000 is 18.6% of this figure. Maybe the government took the unusual choice of rounding up to 20%? Or possibly they had more accurate figures or were working from figures for a previous year.

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  21. "I do not think it at all wise for home educating parents to spread this sort of nonsense. A number of local authority officers known to me have been laughing about this and poking even more holes in the thing than I have."

    Don't think much of the holes you've picked, how about telling us some of there's so we can have a go at replying to those? Maybe they can do better as they are probably more experienced at massaging figures to their advantage.

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  22. "some of there's"

    or even "some of their holes"

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  23. There are several problems here that we have not yet touched upon. Before it is possible to discuss "truancy", we need to define it. The only statistics relate to unauthorised absences. These might be due to children skipping school for fear of bullying; they could be caused by a family holiday in term time. So our first task would be to decide what we meant bt "truancy" We would then have to measure the rate. This would be almost impossible to do. By definition, children and their parents provide no explanation for unauthorised absences.

    There is also no definition of "bullying". You can certainly cast the net so wide that you will include good natured teasing; conversely you can restrict it to physical harm. Until we have a generally accepted defintion of the term "bullying", various estimates will vary greatly, as we have seen.

    Finally, we need to look closely at what questions are being asked of children in surveys. if, for example, a child who has been skipping school is asked whether this was due to bullying, he is liable to jump at the opportunity to excuse his actions. You have handed him a ready made alibi! Leading questions of this sort are a depressingly regular feature of surveys leading to new and wildly inflated claims about both bullying and trunacy.

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  24. "There are several problems here that we have not yet touched upon. Before it is possible to discuss "truancy", we need to define it. The only statistics relate to unauthorised absences."

    Err, isn't that the definition of truancy right there? The government statistics show that 20% of children took an unauthorised absence at least once during the year in question, nobody has claimed that all of these were because of bullying. Obviously the research claim that 42% of those who have ever truanted, truanted because of bullying at least once is always going to be disputable (I doubt it will ever be marked on the register as a reason for absence, for example) but other sources certainly point to major problems with bullying in schools (Childline, for example). Unless you are suggesting that the results of most social research are indisputable, it's a poor hole to pick.

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  25. No, unauthorised absences are not at all the same thing as truancy. An unauthorised absence might be a child who has been kept at home for the day due to illness and the school has not been notified. It might be a family holiday. It might be a shopping trip with Mum. He might have been left at home to look after a younger sibling. These things are all unauthorised absences; most people would not describe them as truancy. The most commonly accepted definition of truancy is that of a child who takes time off from compulsory schooling due to his own free will and without the school's permission. This is of course what most people mean by truancy and it is what can happen when a child is being bullied and skips school as a way of avoiding the problem. Being told by one's parents to accompany them to the shops instead of going to school is not what most people understand by truancy, although this too is an unauthorised absence. Some home educators keep their children at home for a while before officially deregistering them. This too is an unauthorised absence, but hardly truancy.

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  26. "No, unauthorised absences are not at all the same thing as truancy. An unauthorised absence might be a child who has been kept at home for the day due to illness and the school has not been notified. It might be a family holiday. It might be a shopping trip with Mum. He might have been left at home to look after a younger sibling. These things are all unauthorised absences; most people would not describe them as truancy."

    Of course it's truancy. They could be prosecuted for it so why would you claim that it isn't truancy?

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