Many home educated children sit examinations as private candidates. The local authority will therefore not know what exams they are sitting or what results they achieve, as they as they are quoted saying in this article.

This does not mean that home educated children are low achievers, it just means that the local authority does not have the figures.

Many home educated children excel academically because they receive one to one tuition. Parental interest in a child’s education is the biggest determining factor in a child’s success. In the United States, extensive research shows that home educated children achieve on average 30 – 37% higher test scores than children in state schools. Also, many home educated children skip GCSEs and go straight to A levels, Open University, University or College, vocational training or starting their own businesses.

Home education is proving wonderfully effective in our family. We have one gifted child who was bored at school and one with special need who was failing and bullied. If home education fits your family and you are willing to put in the work, it is fantastic!

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My son at age 13 will be starting his Open University Courses. These qualifications will not show on Local Authority lists. Plus If I could afford the hundreds of £££££’s it takes to put him through GCSE’s I may consider GCSE’s, but, when it comes down to it, why should I lumber my son with watered down qualifications, that as an employer I don’t look at anyway. I much prefer to employ someone with real interest in the employment field which he will be employed in. Also Home Educated young adults have proven to me that they are self motivated, have inititive and are self directed learners. They don’t need de-schooling to fit into an adult workforce.
GCSE’s just aren’t as important as the Government make out.

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The mention of a Freedom of Information officer suggests that the author of this article used that mechanism to ask for the figures that were ‘released’, but to what purpose? It rather looks like the start of a campaign calling for more state control using obviously meaningless statistics as an excuse. Good grief, is the secretive author in fact Graham Badman? After all he’s got previous.

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Firstly home educators have no reason to tell the Local Authority about their child’s achievements – education is a parental responsibility and if you are outside the state system it really isn’t the LA’s business.
Secondly GCSEs are expensive, it is sometimes difficult to get places to take external candidates and thirdly they are often mind numbingly boring and very prescriptive.
There are plenty of alternatives – going straight to A-Levels, Open University and other University courses, NVQs, City and Guilds, IGCEs etc. So many children outside school have no reason to do GCSEs. And not all schools choose to do them either http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8401133.stm .
Thirdly the current class based, test driven education system is just one of many possible approaches to edcuation. Informal learning, one-to-one conversations, different curriculums etc can all play a part in education that means that GCSEs may have little value for home educated children.
The body of evidence from the US means that in the States it is widely accepted that home education (home schooling) achieves good results. Most recently the Progress Report 2009: Homeschool Academic Achievement and Demographics included 11,739 homeschooled students from all 50 states who took three well-known tests—California Achievement Test, Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, and Stanford Achievement Test for the 2007–08 academic year. The Progress Report is the most comprehensive homeschool academic study ever completed. It found as in previously studies that homeschoolers consistently perform above average – 37 percentile points higher than public schools.
In the US The level of state interference varies greatly but has been found to have no effect on attainment levels. In other words LA involvement has been shown to have no benefit to a group of children who routinely outperform school based attainment.

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firstly the LA do not know anything about a vast number of the home educated children at all. they do not provide free gcse exam places for HE children so they cannot presume to monitor them. gcses are taken independently, giving them no indication of the pass rate, so how can they possibly comment on this. Exams, if taken at all are more likely to be taken at a rate of a few a year, starting at a younger age, or waiting until they become free after 16.
i know from experience of having a child in school that her education was seriously held back by the school system, if she asked questions in science (and lets face it, questioning science is what HE children do best) she was told she didn’t need to know that because it wouldn’t be on the exam paper!!! i ask you, how can this be good education, its just learning what is on the exam paper.
she is now fed up with this restrictive style of learning and has bypassed A levels too. she is studying an engineering degree with the open university. we wish we hadn’t bothered with the school system at all, we even found out that some non academic exams were added to the curriculum and children forced to study them just to boost the pass rate at that school,this is a ridiculous way of over inflating exam figures. At least i can confidently say that my children will have a full education and if they ask questions i will answer them, education does not have much to do with how many gcse passes you have.

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