Getting a risk-free trial during COVID: Accidental and deliberate home educators, responsibilisation and the growing population of children being educated outside of school

Numbers coming out of education departments in Australia suggest that, even though most Australian schools are open, and families are able to send their children to them, increasing numbers of parents are deciding to keep their children at home for their education (Queensland Government: Department of Education, 2020). It may be that, as the president of Australia’s home education representative body stated during the pandemic, Covid school closures offered a “risk-free trial” of home education (Lever, 2020) by providing an a-posteriori experience of education outside of schools. Building on the Covid experiences, this paper suggests that ‘accidentally falling into’ home education may be significant in understanding parents’ home education choices. Using numbers of home educators from Australia, and the associated data on their location and ages, this paper argues responsibilisation (see Doherty & Dooley, 2018) provides a suitable lens to examine how parents may decide, after an a-posteriori experience such as Covid school closures and previous, often negative, experiences of schooling, to home educate in the medium to long term. This paper proposes that increasing numbers of home educators will be seen in various jurisdictions where families perceive themselves responsibilised to home educate due to Covid as an a-posteriori experiences of home education. The paper proposes these families are ‘accidental’ home educators (English, 2021). By contrast, much more stable is the ‘deliberate’ home education population, those whose choices are based in a-priori beliefs about schooling. The paper proposes that the accidental home education category may be better able to explain the growing numbers of home educators in Australia and across the world, providing a means for governments to respond to the needs of this cohort, and the policies required to manage this population.

Reliable or Risky?

The global and growing phenomenon of home education is regulated differently in different countries and different states. Where is it legal the regulatory burden on home educators ranges from low to moderate to high. A range of commentators, including home educators, work to shape the frames through which home education is understood and subsequently regulated. Using an illustrative case study, this chapter shows that regulation impacts on child wellbeing and that home educators take different motivational postures based on a range of factors, of which their relationship with the regulator is one. The degree to which regulators cultivate a cooperative relationship is proposed as a critical factor in developing a positive regulatory environment. Co-production of home education regulations, as was previously undertaken in Tasmania, Australia, is presented as an effective and more acceptable approach to regulation. This is recommended as a model of practice to be undertaken in other settings.

Internet Use in Home-Education

Home educated students are Australia's fastest growing educational demographic. This growth may be due to the ubiquitous availability of resources made possible by the internet. This chapter considers several enablers and barriers to internet use in home education, using search engines as a case study. Search engine use is associated with several benefits and is the most prolific online activity conducted in home education. The chapter reports on a study into whether or not the search engine use of home educated students' (so-called digital natives) is stronger than that of their parent-educators (so-called digital immigrants). The study involved a survey of 60 parent-educators and observations, tests and interviews with five families. Irrespective of age, all searchers were found to use search engines in superficial ways. Findings can assist the growing number of Australians educating at home to maximise enablers while minimising any barriers to effective search engine use. Future research directions and the practicalities of existing literature for home-educators and students are also discussed.

Home Education in the United Kingdom

Home education is the fastest growing educational movement in the world and the research remains limited on why and how it has become so popular. This chapter highlights the historical development of home education and its legal base in the context of the United Kingdom. It also explores many of the current issues facing the home educators, the government of the UK, and the wider community. Based on the existing literature, it briefly explores the history of the home education movement in the UK and how policy and practice come to this point at this time. It investigates the different perspectives on how and why home education is the fastest growing educational movement in the 21st century's UK.

Schooling vs Home Education: Implications in Measuring Success in Home Education in The United Kingdom

This paper aims to address the current limitations of measuring success in Home Education. Educational achievements in schools are measured through standard knowledge-based assessments which take place during various stages in a child’s formal education, based on the National Curriculum. However, due to the unique purpose, aims and methods used by Home Educators, current measurements and standards are incompatible with achievements identified by Home Educating families. The established traditional concepts of educational success are the framework of current measurement of educational achievements, which may be contrary to the concepts of families who follow different philosophical understandings of education. The reality of each family having their individual aims and purpose of Home Education has resulted in their achievements to be immeasurable by the traditional standards as used in schools. This paper aims to argue that it is necessary to review current philosophical and theoretical concepts in education, apart from knowledge-based education as set out by the state in the National Curriculum. This will allow us to develop new common grounds in measurement of educational success inclusive of individual achievements set out by Home Educators.

Equipping Parents for Effective HOME Schooling

The COVID-19 crisis has shuttered schools across the globe and left millions of schoolchildren quarantined. This pandemic has highlighted the importance of adequately educating homebound children. Although homeschooling has been growing in popularity in some areas of the world, particularly in the United States, it has not constituted a large percentage of the educational establishment in any part of the world. There has been debate about homeschooling for decades. This paper aims to show that success with homeschooling is possible and it will provide suggestions for empowering families to achieve that. Four ways to empower home educators have been summarized into the HOME acronym. This acronym stands for (H) helping families find their fit, (O) offering a diversity of teaching resources, (M) making homeschooling socially acceptable, and (E) empowering homeschool partnerships. These practices can serve as a template for organizations that wish to support families who choose to homeschool their children or who are forced to by global constraints. The recent crisis has provided an opportunity for nations, organizations, families, and students to share the leadership of their educational resources and practices. Collaboration and cooperation can help ensure homebound children receive the education they need. This type of collaboration will help prepare the world for the educational challenges the future might bring.

Analisis Gaya Belajar Siswa melalui Media Pembelajaran Daring di Masa Pandemi Covid-19

Covid-19 is a highly contagious virus and spreads very quickly throughout the world. This has a broad impact on all segments of social life, including education. Responding to this, the Indonesian government temporarily eliminates the teaching and learning process in schools and conducts learning from home. Educators are required to be able to provide instruction to students in accordance with this situation and condition faced. Therefore, it is important for teachers to understand the learning styles of their students as an orientation for determining appropriate learning media. This study explores the learning styles of students at Madrasah Aliyah Negeri 1 Semarang and discovers the most suitable learning media in accordance with the students’ learning styles. The results showed that visual learning style was the most preferred so instructional videos were found as the most appropriate teaching media.

Fundamental British and “The Other” Values—An Analytical Reflection on Implications for Home Education

This paper reflects on the question of whether, and how, Fundamental British Values (FBVs) may affect the practice of home education in the UK. Fundamental British Values were introduced into the national curriculum in 2014, for state administered schools and preschools which have since been required to demonstrate that FBVs are embedded in the practice of the setting. Home educators, on the other hand, are not obliged to follow the national curriculum meaning that the effect of FBVs on such alternative education is not obvious. However, this paper draws attention to the wider environment of home education by considering FBVs as the product of three particular spheres of contemporary discourse as they interrelate and influence each other. These are the affordances of identity in a postinternational era, expressions of Foucauldian governmentality in terms of self-surveillance and management, and the developmental paradigm. Fundamental British Values, alongside the concept of parenting and the materialization of a particular social morality, are considered as the inescapably emergent products of the un/reason created by the overlapping of these discourses. Their convergence, in turn, creates a weight of logic from which FBVs exert influence over the practice and judgment of alternative forms of education.

Muslim Home Educators in the Time of Prevent

Following the implementation of the Prevent strategy in the United Kingdom and the public linking of Muslim home education with radicalization, this research explores the perspectives of Muslim home educators. Using the concept of moral panics, this paper synthesizes work on Muslim identity with that of folk devil reactions to stigmatization. Data are drawn from three case study families via questionnaires and interviews and analyzed thematically within a symbolic interactionist framework, using an adaptation of Griffiths “folk devil reaction model” as an interpretative guide. Following an exploration of participants’ reflective self-appraisals, two categories of response are identified: retreat and resistance. Both of these are further subdivided, respectively, into reactions of blending in and withdrawing and reactions of drawing on resources and contestation. The paper argues that a legal and increasingly popular educational choice has been co-opted from being an individual family decision into a political narrative of danger, radicalization, and security implications. In a climate where prejudice about home education and Islam already abundantly exist, such a narrative may contribute to an increasingly intolerant society. Recognition of the situation of Muslim home educators may go some way toward tempering this.

The Right to Be and Become: Black Home-Educators as Child Privacy Protectors

The right to privacy is one of the most fundamental rights in American jurisprudence. In 1890, Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis conceptualized the right to privacy as the right to be let alone and inspired privacy jurisprudence that tracked their initial description. Warren and Brandeis conceptualized further that this right was not exclusively meant to protect one’s body or physical property. Privacy rights were protective of “the products and the processes of the mind” and the “inviolate personality.” Privacy was further understood to protect the ability to “live one’s life as one chooses, free from assault, intrusion or invasion except as can be justified by the clear needs of community living under a government of law.” Case law supported and extended their theorization by recognizing that privacy is essentially bound up in an individual’s ability to live a self-authored and self-curated life without unnecessary intrusions and distractions. Hence, privacy may be viewed as the right of individuals to be and become themselves. This right is well-established; however, scholars have vastly undertheorized the right to privacy as it intersects with racial discrimination and childhood. Specifically, the ways in which racial discrimination strips Black people—and therefore Black children—of privacy rights and protections, and the ways in which Black people reclaim and reshape those rights and protections remain a dynamic and fertile space, ripe for exploration yet unacknowledged by privacy law scholars. The most vulnerable members of the Black population, children, rely on their parents to protect their rights until they are capable of doing so themselves. Still, the American education system exposes Black children to racial discrimination that results in life-long injuries ranging from the psychological harms of daily racial micro-aggressions and assaults, to disproportionate exclusionary discipline and juvenile incarceration. One response to these ongoing and often traumatic incursions is a growing number of Black parents have decided to remove their children from traditional school settings. Instead, these parents provide their children with home-education in order to protect their children’s right to be and become in childhood.