Access to Local Registered Exam Centres for Home Educated Young People
Many of us took the opportunity in the recent government consultation on guidelines for local authorities to ask why home educated young people were currently denied access to registered local examination centres.
The NFER Report on Support for Home Educators published at the end of July also raises the same issue at various points (executive summary p.xi; executive summary p.xii; Report p.4-5; Report p.6; Chapter 5 Support for 14-19 year olds, see pp.37,41, 42 ; Recommendations p.87).
Scarborough LA now allows home educated young people to access GCSE English and Maths using the facilities of the local Pupil Referral Unit as a registered examination centre.
NFER Report page 42 Focus group data: Access to examination centres
"Within one of the focus groups, there was some discussion about how accessing examination centres is currently a very challenging area for home educators. It was suggested that this perception may be maintained by lack of collective action on the part of home educators on the issue and that they tend to adopt routes already established by other home educators to gaining access, no matter how difficult they may be ( eg travelling a long distance ). It was felt that there needed to be a local solution and local authorities could signpost home educators better to examination centres which provide for external candidates. There was a local authority view that access to recognised examination centres for home educated children should not pose a problem and that this was something that the local authority should be able to arrange. However, concern was expressed that the coursework element of some GCSEs could lead to complications for schools, and, as such, this issue might only be resolved by examination boards substituting an additional paper for the coursework aspect of GCSEs."
In The Future Will Independent Schools Offer Exam Centre Access to Home Educators?
On Friday 18th January representatives of Education Otherwise Government Policy Group, together with Trustees from HEAS, were invited by DCSF to a meeting in London at the head office of the Independent Schools Council. Denise Hunter from DCSF Independent State Schools Partnership/ Elective Home Education team also attended the meeting.
The main purpose of the meeting was to exchange information about the difficulties currently faced by home educated young people wanting to take GCSEs,IGCSEs and A levels and to ascertain some basic geographical information about independent schools. There are over a thousand independent schools in this country, spread throughout England but located predominantly in the South East. One in six schools prepares pupils for IGCSEs rather than GCSEs.
Independent schools are looking for ways to demonstrate that they provide a public benefit by offering educational opportunities to children from lower income families. We are aware of a few schools in the independent sector who already provide access to examination centres.
These were very early discussions. We would hate to raise peoples hopes that we might get exam centre access this way only to find it did not happen. Ultimately the ISC board will have to decide whether or not this is something the independent sector wants to take forward.
We will of course keep our members informed of any further progress we are able to make in this area.
A positive spin-off from the meeting is that the DCSF home education representative is now much better briefed about the problems home educators have in gaining exam access. EO asked Denise Hunter to raise the following question with the Department : why are state schools not able and willing to provide this opportunity.
