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Career Connect undertakes research into the support needs of home-educated pupils
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Study shows parents and children receive little careers advice and value peer support
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Charity hopes to test proposed reforms to support with councils on a larger scale
ACTION
Over the past year, Career Connect, which provides careers information, advice and guidance in the North West, worked in partnership with Capacity, an organisation specialising in innovation of public and third sector services, to understand the needs of families and carers who felt they had no other choice but to remove their child from school.
Career Connect wanted to undertake the research because the number of children and young people who are electively home educated (EHE) has risen from 37,500 in 2016 to an estimated 115,542 in 2021, according to figures from the Association of Directors of Children's Services. While the decision to home educate can be a positive choice for some families, for others it is a solution to a bad experience at school.
“Over the last five years it's been clear the number of young people coming out of school is growing and along with that was an increasing sense that more of those families are not making that decision in a well-informed way,” says Gary Mundy, director of research and evaluation at Career Connect. “It was more of a short-term solution to other problems. They were then finding that once out of school none of that provision was accessible to them. Our interest was meeting the needs of those families.”
The team engaged with 52 people through a mix of surveys and individual interviews in four local areas where Career Connect works. Researchers found multiple, connected reasons why families or carers withdraw young people from school. These included unmet emotional and mental health needs which continued attendance at school would exacerbate; struggles to “fit in” academically or socially; the absence of flexible options for schooling and bespoke support; and avoidance of fines for non-attendance while remaining registered as attending school.
The research also found a range of substantial challenges faced by young people and parents or carers, when a child is withdrawn from school. These included the transition period from school to full-time home education, access to educational resources and the confidence of parents or carers to teach, the extra financial burden of home education including access to technology, and parents or carers coping with their own health and work challenges.
An overriding theme to emerge was that families felt socially isolated, explains Mundy. “The model for careers provision is almost entirely done through schools,” he says. “Bringing people in a similar situation together to form a social network was a good thing. The activity became a valued part of what we were doing – from an emotional point of view and for sharing information.”
IMPACT
Using the insights gained from the research, Career Connect worked with Capacity to identify several activities that they piloted with parents, carers and young people in 2022.
These included one-to-one or small group sessions/workshops with young people educated at home to map out pathways and deliver careers information, and the testing of bespoke social and educational activities and events as part of a summer programme for young people who are electively home educated. From this work, the researchers developed a list of recommendations for support measures for EHE families. These included:
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An offer of support to families at the point of becoming electively home educated
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Allocating a named advisor or key worker across all age groups
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Creating opportunities to deliver support via remote methods
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Peer mentoring and coaching for both parents and children
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Offer young people opportunities to improve their wellbeing.
“We’ve built enough evidence to see there's something here worth testing and evaluating but the next stage is to bring that wider group of stakeholders together – providers, commissioners and careers hubs,” says Mundy.
To that end, Career Connect wants to test the recommendations it has developed at a wider scale. Mundy is talking to local authorities and looking at funding a larger evaluation from charitable foundations.
“There are several trusts out there looking to fund innovation in service delivery particularly if that has an evidence generation component,” he says. “That's the next rung on the ladder. We can then share that evidence and integrate it into practice.”
In terms of what type of service this might result in, Mundy says he sees it more likely to be of interest to local authorities than schools as part of their service to support disadvantaged learners.
“Local authorities are already doing work to support pupils at risk of being Neet (not in education, employment or training),” he says. “We want to work with them to think whether it is something you’d integrate into a post-16 Neet service or something that sits separate to that.
