Rising levels of home education should get the sector asking questions about access

A recent parliamentary debate estimated that one per cent of the schooled-aged population in England is home educated – and numbers look to be rising sharply.

Many public bodies and private companies have caught onto the scale of home education, and have events or webpages specifically for home educators, such as this example from the Natural History Museum.

Does higher education reflect this changing educational landscape? We have a sector-wide practice of working with specific groups, such as mature or international students. The same is needed – but does not currently exist – for home educators.

Why this matters

A sense of being seen and supported is key to feeling welcome and to a sense of belonging. This is about not just an issue of course materials, but also in the entrance and application communication which might affect whether an individual applies or even aspires to HE.

Home educators also have different, and legitimate, questions about admissions and transition, compared to their schooled peers.

The Home Ed exam wiki, which is made by home educators for home educators to help navigate qualifications, includes some testimonials of experiences accessing higher education. Themes include: fears or assumptions that children would not be able to access higher education; the need to appeal offer decisions, for example due to refusal because of not having a language GCSE; and differences in the approach to study compared to schooled peers, which suggests a different transition experience. There’s also reference to the the positive impact on individuals of independent admissions processes, which can make university accessible to out-of-the-box applicants.

Grades, in context

If you want to get an idea how well your institution is meeting this new educational landscape, ask colleagues how home educators access exams. Nine times out of ten, they won’t know and possibly haven’t ever thought about it.

This matters. How can we make decisions about admissions if we do not understand the context? How can prospective students get appropriate, timely advice if we don’t preempt the typical questions of this sizable minority?

Home educators need to arrange and fund their own exams privately. The availability and cost of exam centres varies significantly depending on region. This clearly presents potential access issues.

As one researcher notes:

…many of these children are home-educated because they were disadvantaged in the schooling system. Some home educators’ difficulty in gaining qualifications may put young people at a further disadvantage. Although parents opted out of the mainstream system, it remains debatable if they opted out of their children’s right to obtain a qualification that our society currently relies on.

For these and other practical reasons, many home educators take fewer qualifications than schooled peers and may take them over a longer period. Private candidates cannot usually take qualifications with a coursework element. This affects the qualifications and subjects they can access, including Extended Project Qualifications (EPQ).

However, we need to remember that fewer qualifications does not necessary mean an academically weaker student, as one student – who went on to achieve a first at the University of Oxford – explains on the wiki:

The experience of studying for these exams in a HE [home educating] environment, where learning can avoid the spoon-feeding tendencies of school, should mean that you will get far more out of your GCSE experience than most school pupils do, despite taking less. I certainly found that the transition to A levels, where more independent thinking is asked of you, was far easier for me than for most of my contemporaries at school. So just keep developing that independent learning and independence of mind, and the GCSEs are just an added bonus!

Home educators may also use alternative routes to evidence academic achievements, including SATs and the High School Diploma, as well as have interesting CVs with volunteering or citizen science experiences.

There needs to be relevant discussions about those qualifications and paths into university that sit outside the schooled norm, so that families and universities can make informed choices.

Existing widening participation groups

Here’s another testimonial from the wiki:

My husband and I do not come from an academic background and Barney is the first person in our family to go to uni. When my two were younger I heard stories of home-schooled kids going to uni and always thought it was because their parents were lawyers, doctors, teachers, etc.

Many home educators fall into our existing widening participation categories. For many, it is the reason they home educate.

However, the language and cultural references used to in eligibility criteria of established HE widening participation programmes are heavily school-centred and therefore may inadvertently exclude. Programmes often state you must be a state-school pupil, even if in fact home educators would be eligible.

Another common eligibility criterion is whether someone “received free school meals.” If you haven’t attended school, clearly you cannot have received free school meals. But what about individuals who would have been eligible if they had attended school? Surely it is this economic context that matters, rather than there being a disadvantage due to the receipt of the food itself.

I was interested to see the language used by the University of Leeds for their Reach for Excellence programme eligibility They refer to individuals coming from a household with a “gross annual income of £25,000 or below.” This seems like the type of simple, inclusive good practice that needs to be shared and taken up across HE institutions and in the language of the UCAS application itself.

Here’s the opportunity

Home education and higher education have much in common. At the heart of the educational philosophies that drive many home educators is the desire to instil a lifelong love of learning.

Many of the home educated children I meet inspire me – they have a deep, self-propelled passion for learning, and their out-of-the-box thinking could bring so much to higher education. If we don’t engage more effectively with the home ed community, we risk missing out on some fantastic potential future students.

Interestingly, Harvard researchers found that homeschooled children compared favourably to or even outperformed schooled peers in some metrics. However, they also found that they are less likely to achieve a college degree in young adulthood. Clearly there may be many reasons for this, but one possibility that they raised was the barriers put up by higher education itself towards home schoolers.

How about the UK? Is higher education in the UK accessible to home educators – and as a sector, are we even asking this question to find out? Higher education sits in a broader context, and that context changes. We must keep up.