2019 Research: Home Education and Child Abuse How Media Rhetoric Drives the Myth

Home Education and Child Abuse: How Media Rhetoric Drives the Myth.

Wendy Charles-Warner 2019

 Abstract

Successive proposals have been made in recent years to introduce strict monitoring of home educated children, on the basis that they are at safeguarding risk due to being ‘invisible’, ‘unseen’, or ‘off the grid’. Concurrent with these political moves has been a prodigious rise in media articles relating to home education, mostly led by the assumption that those children are at risk. Emotive language within those reports has raised public interest in the issue, leading to debate in private and professional circles alike. In what appears to be a causal link, these reports fuel growing calls for introduction of monitoring of home educated children. This study looks at the basis for those calls for monitoring, by examining empirical evidence of relative safeguarding risk between home educated children, children under 5 years of age and children aged 5 to 16 years.

Home educated children were found to be subject to statistically significant higher rates of referral for assessment under the Children Act 1989 s47 at 4.17% than were children under 5 years of age at 2.34 % and children aged 5 to 16 years at 2.03%. Despite these higher rates of referral, no significant difference was found between rates of child protection plan in children who are home educated at 0.44% and children aged 5 to 16 years at 0.43%. Difference in rates of child protection plan in children under 5 years of age compared to home educated children and children aged 5 to 16 years were statistically significant at 0.71%. Conversion rates from referral under the Children Act 1989 s47 to child protection plan were 11.06% in home educated children compared to 35.40% in children under 5 years of age and 26.81% in children aged 5 to 16 years.

Despite home educated children being at no greater safeguarding risk than other children, media rhetoric is fuelling calls for strict monitoring of those children, whilst self-perpetuating concerns in respect of their safeguarding. This in turn leads to unwarranted pressure on children’s social service’s resources and on home educating families, who face intrusion into their private family lives if calls for such monitoring are acted upon.

FULL RESEARCH HERE:  

2019 Research, Home Education and Child Abuse How Media Rhetoric Drives the Myth