"Lost generation" of home-educated children facing uncertain future
Exclusive: Home-educated children have an increased chance of being unemployed or dropping out of education entirely, new research reveals.
Thousands of children who are being educated at home because schools cannot support them are at high risk of falling out of the system and becoming unemployed or out of training at the age of 16 — with dire consequences for their life chances — The Lead can reveal.
Academics studying a cohort of children who have left school and are being home-educated say their risk of becoming “not in education, employment and training” (NEET) is increasing because there is little or no support for families who are home-educating.
With a rapidly growing population of children now learning at home, the study warns of a “lost generation” of young people becoming NEET in the next five years. There are already almost one million young people who are NEET, according to new figures published by the Office for National Statistics last week.
Their research comes as we spoke to the mother of a teenage boy who says due to his needs, and lack of support in school, she was left with no choice but to withdraw him from mainstream education and teach him at home.
Jai Breitnauer’s son was home-educated from the age of eight before attending a special school which admitted it couldn’t meet his needs at age 14. Now aged 16, he has been registered as “educated otherwise than at school” for the past two years, which means the local council offers a personal budget for the parents to spend on his education.
But despite that additional support, she says there is “absolutely no help” in planning what happens to him after this year.
“I think if two years ago I had known what I know now, I would have approached things very differently,” she admits. “The focus when he left school was just trying to find suitable providers for his education. We got him into a programme, but it’s a vocational diploma. There are no exams. It will give him a diploma which should be equivalent between six and eight GCSEs at a pass, but it’s not particularly well known.
"He wasn't managing. He came off roll because we’re a family in crisis and we couldn't think of what else to do."
Breitnauer - a marketing and communications manager, and political activist - says that despite having the resources and education to seek the best support for her child, she has still been shocked to discover how little advice and guidance there was available. That gap left her on a study programme which did not offer her son access to the college course he desired.
Her son has chosen a training course in a related vocation next year, but the college admissions team does not recognise the diploma he is working towards. To access it, his parents have had to enrol him in further study to get a certificate for functional maths and English.
“He’s doing twice as much as he needs to because the college won’t accept his diploma,” she says.
The family is now fighting to secure access arrangements for those exams, such as extra time for the examination as specified in his education care plan, in the hope that he will pass and be able to progress to the next stage of his life.
Storing up problems for later life
Multiple studies across European nations demonstrate a link between NEET status in early life and a host of issues in later life including poor mental health, lower lifetime earnings and even higher mortality rates. One study tracked young people in Scotland over a decade and found that NEETs in 2001 were 2.5 times more likely to work in lower status occupations in 2011 than their peers, if they managed to find work at all. Being young and unemployed was also associated with a high risk of poor physical health both 10 and 20 years later.
Around 126,000 children in England were home-schooled at any point during 2022-23, up from 116,000 in 2021-22. Numbers are still rising, with many children with special educational needs (SEN) being removed from school after reaching crisis point. Recent reports show that pupils are most likely to withdraw from school for elective home-education in years 10 and 11, the years in which teenagers prepare for GCSE examinations.
In the past, most home-educating families made this choice for ideological or faith reasons and did so with a long-term plan for their child’s education and development. But academics at Manchester Metropolitan University say their research tracking the path of 84 families shows this is no longer the case: most are home-educating only because they feel they have no other choice. They are entering the arrangement without preparation or support for what comes next. This means many pupils drop out of their GCSE courses, leaving parents with no idea how to enrol their child to sit these or alternative exams elsewhere — and no money to help them pay the high cost if they do so.
“Our data is showing quite clearly that there is a massive shift now in who that home-educated population are, and what you’re seeing is SEN or pupils who have experienced bullying, mental health and anxiety issues,” Lisa Russell, professor of education and employment at Manchester Metropolitan University, tells The Lead.
“Families are pulling their young people out of education because the setting doesn’t work for whatever reason. It’s not a choice for the vast majority of families that we’re working with. Parents are wanting to get their children out of education because they perceive some kind of danger or emotional injury. It’s an emergency situation.”
Prof Russell says this means families were left with no information or support in crucial years of their children’s education, which had huge impacts on their future. “Many families got into it quite blindly so they don’t know that it will cost £500 per GCSE if they take that young person out; they don’t know what exam boards they are following or how to get their registered to do a maths GCSE,” she says. “Local authorities were saying they don’t have the resources to deal with this. We’re starting to see some tracking and safeguarding [of pupils] but there is no mandatory state intervention.”
Without GCSEs or similar qualifications proving English and maths skills, children can’t access future education or training — but despite this, most local authorities do not have dedicated teams in place to help home-educating families navigate the transition from home education to training or further study.
The changing demographics of home-education
Researchers at Manchester Metropolitan University say they have also observed a link between pupils being home-educated and coming from a lower socioeconomic background — a big shift in the demographics for this group in recent years. This is partly because these families cannot afford to pay for private support for their struggling children outside school, such as counselling, SEN diagnosis or occupational therapy, so they are more likely to reach a crisis point.
“Disadvantaged young people are opting — or being forced — to be home-educated without understanding what that means and the implications for the future. That is going to have a massive effect on what they’re able to do post-16 and their NEET status,” says Dr Russell.
“We’re talking about a lost generation. These young people are really going under the radar. We are definitely going to see implications for employment outcomes because without qualifications there’s a broken trajectory there that’s very difficult to fix once you get out of it.”
Private tutors report that they are currently schooling home-educated children in the material covered by the GCSE syllabus, or equivalent in Scotland, but that their pupils have no access to formal examination to prove their level of attainment.
Karen Simpson, who runs a private tutoring business online, says: “If I’m contacted by a parent for support for that child during the school day, it’s not because they have chosen to home-educate, it’s because they have no option. A lot of these families don’t have any clue what they should be learning. A lot of them are just going on to the computer and just trying to find resources of their own.”
“Many children are not in a position to actually sit the exam, often due to emotional difficulties. We are going to end up with a generation with no qualifications or prospects for the future. It's a very worrying situation,” she adds. “We’re losing these kids. And the ones that can’t afford this access — well, I don’t know where they go.”
The government’s draft Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill includes plans for a register of home-educated children and in January the Department for Education updated its guidance to name elective home education as a risk factor for becoming NEET.
But educational psychologist Dr Jen Wills Lamacq says this is not yet translating into more support to help those families with secondary-age children learning at home. She says it’s not only parents of the children she works with who feel abandoned, it’s the children themselves.
“Teenagers with fragile mental health, how are they going to feel motivated and engaged and confident about these challenges ahead when they feel like they have failed or that there’s something wrong with them, or they just feel really demoralised? They tried their best and it didn’t feel like anyone helped them. And then it happens again,” she explains.
“Particularly for parents in year 10 and 11 they’ve made that initial choice [to home-educate] and the immediate crisis has receded a little, but then they’re hit with this new frontier about what’s going to happen to their child next. A lot of these children have a huge amount of potential and the parents are worrying about how they are going to reach it.”
Dr Wills Lamacq believes immediate practical support for this group to prevent a new wave of young NEETs should include providing accessible routes to functional English and maths qualifications with examinations with adjustments available at community exam centres outside schools. Preventing schools from "off-rolling" children who are struggling in a school setting or may not achieve desired grades is also essential, she says: “It’s called comprehensive education, after all.”
Due to lack of funding in the education system, schools do not have the resources to provide neurodivergent children or those with other additional needs with the close support to meet their potential, such as one-to-one teaching assistance, breaks from busy environments and personalised mental health support. Children forced to learn in an environment that doesn’t meet their needs often react through poor behaviour, leading to regular punishment, or facing an emotional crisis.
Regular absence from school or classroom disruption may lead to school encouraging home education or threatening to ‘off roll’, or reporting to a local authority that it can no longer accommodate the child. Most parents with a neurodivergent child say they are home schooling out of necessity, not choice.
Extra funding for local authorities to employ staff working with home-educating parents, and joining up support between NEET prevention teams and education teams, is also necessary, according to Dr Russell.
A spokesperson for the Local Government Association said it welcomed the government’s move to create a home-education register. “We are keen to see this measure implemented as quickly as possible through appropriate legislation,” they said. “Councils are committed to supporting children who are missing out on school, tackling the disadvantage gap in educational attainment, and ensuring every child has the support they need to achieve their potential.
“There is an urgent need for a cross-government strategy for children which should include measures to tackle rising disadvantage and the wider factors that are contributing toward causing persistent absence and for children to miss out on school. This must include reforming the SEND system; expanding access to mental health support and youth services; connecting with hard-to-reach communities; and ensuring schools are resourced, supported and incentivised.”
What is the government doing?
The government is promising an overhaul of the funding system for SEND children, including a financial settlement for councils which are being bankrupted by the cost of supporting children despite nevertheless failing to support thousands of children who are now at high risk of falling out of the system. Experts say that the funding for new specialist school places and extra classroom support will not be sufficient to keep more children in school while the system of school funding is still largely based on results, rather than on meeting the needs of every child in a system that is truly comprehensive.
But the government's strategy, expected to be set out in a white paper later this spring, will take years to implement. In order to avoid a crisis, action must be taken now. Educationalists are calling for immediate extra funding for local authority teams to assist families who find themselves home-schooling unexpectedly and more flexibility around entry requirements to post-16 courses and traineeships, such as allowing access for those who can demonstrate they have functional English and maths skills by participation in tasks, rather than providing a certificate of examination.
About the author: Hannah Fearn is a freelance journalist specialising in social affairs. She was comment editor of The Independent for seven years, and has previously worked for The Guardian, Times Higher Education and Inside Housing. She has a special interest in inequality, poverty, housing, education and life chances.
Education is a topic we care passionately about at The Lead, and something we return to regularly. From exposing Nigel Farage’s disregard for our education system, to the rise of authoritarian schools and how increasingly girls from black communities are not safe in our schools, we aim to expose and explore solutions for challenges our education system - across primary, secondary, further and higher education faces. We’ve also explored how children with special educational needs are being increasingly let-down by the education system, and the pressure this puts on parents and carers, as Hannah Fearn reported in our special report. You can support our reporting on education by becoming a paid subscriber to The Lead and supporting our original, independent, journalism on this topic.