As schools increasingly become slaves to their targets and fearful of their next Ofsted inspection the prospect of offloading students whose progress challenges the targets gathers momentum. All too often encouraging parents/carers to move their child to a home tuition plan is seen as a cosy option. For a distraught and worried parent/carer who is grasping at straws it seems at face value to be a welcome solution. For the school it presents a release from a problem threatening to bring the school below the Ofsted floor targets and perhaps, just as important, it means that the school budget is protected from having to make expensive assessments and specialist provision. For the school management it is an easy get out of jail from making hard choices.
So that’s all too often the background now let us turn to the reality. For a child to undergo home tuition there has to be an education plan produced for and monitored by the relevant local authority. At best this seems to be a process of variable quality in times of stretched local government finances . This plan has to be resourced and managed by the parents/carers who, by implication, will need a significant understanding of the education process, regulations and external assessments. In theory Ofsted can inspect home tuition delivery. There is of course a safeguarding issue for the home taught child/student but here the waters become murky. The previous school will without doubt wash their hands of any responsibility for the child/student because they will be off their roll. The relevant local authority has a duty of care but how effectively this is carried out will vary across England.
Experience tells us that parents/carers being groomed for home tuition will be told that there are learning materials on line which can be accessed . The uninformed and inexperienced parent/carer will easily think that all they have had to do is to park their child/student in front of a screen all day and everything will be fine. Well let us reflect why the school is trying to offload the child/student . It is highly unlikely that it will be because the individual is a star , highly motivated with a happy zest for learning. One way or another there will very likely be significant challenges which the school has been unable to meet. This means that the home taught child/student will need a high level of supervision and expertise with bought in specialist tutors at a minimum cost of £180 per day which equates in a full week to at least £900 or £36,000 for an academic school year.
Where the media currently project positive images of a home taught child/student it is so often an affluent middle class family with significant professional insight into the nature of the task. Indeed a family where one adult member can give up paid employment to supervise the whole home tuition process.
Our advice to parents/carers is that they have a statutory right to free state provided education appropriate to the needs of their child . They need to dig in and insist on this.
As an aside the Society set up the Robert Owen Academy to address these issues and others. It was highly successful in its work but in the end the mindless pressure from the local authority supported by some headteachers who felt threatened by it success led to the Minister kicking for touch and closing the school. As co-operators we have learned through history that change comes through the struggle against the forces of vested interest. Is it time to resurrect a co-operative academy committed to STEAM ( Science, technology, engineering, the arts and Mathematics) through carefully structured individual learning programmes? Let me have your thoughts at Chris@robertowensociety.org
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