States are investing considerable amounts of money in pre-kindergarten programs for 4-year-olds. A new study finds that the quality of interactions between teachers and children plays a key role in accounting for gains in children’s development when compared to typical quality indicators such as teachers’ education, class size, and child-to-teacher ratio.

The study suggests that efforts to promote interactions with teachers that are instructionally and emotionally supportive can help children gain the most benefit from their pre-K experience and be more ready for school.

"These results provide compelling evidence that young children’s learning in pre-K occurs in large part through high-quality emotional and instructional interactions with teachers," according to Andrew J. Mashburn, senior research scientist at the Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning at the University of Virginia and the lead author of the study. "This helps parents, teachers, and program administrators understand the specific features of pre-K programs that directly support children’s academic, language and social development," Mashburn said.

"These results also have important implications for state policy-makers who are deciding how to design and regulate pre-K programs in ways that truly benefit children. Efforts that focus on the quality of instructional and emotional interactions within pre-K classrooms appear to have the potential to improve children’s development, more so than the traditional approaches of class size, teacher qualifications and student-teacher ratios" "Given that other studies have found the quality of instructional and emotional interactions in pre-K classrooms to be average at best, these results point to the importance of working to improve teacher-child classroom interactions."

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I’ve been thinking about the home education community in England and how different it can be from one area to another.  On a Thursday during term time, my children and I go to Wargrave in Berkshire to attend the Camp Mohawk Home Education group.  Many of the children there have been home educated for some time and the reason that they are home educated is because their parents knew about home education and believe it to be a better alternative to schooling. Each has their own way of putting their home education into practice, but generally they make those choices consciously.

Where we live, on the edge of Greater London, a large number of the teenagers and children out of school are being home educated because they have experienced problems at school.  Sometimes this means that they were badly bullied, on other occasions that they were disruptive or violent in school and have been expelled.   Often the parents are unwilling home educators, who don’t believe in their own ability to educate their children satisfactorily.

I always say that I have a foot in both camps, really.  I did remove my children from school because they were unhappy, but I have come to believe that home education is a far better - and less damaging - way of educating children.

Often parents who are home educating due to necessity, rely on advice from local authorities or teachers who have no actual experience of home education at all.  In my dealing with my local authority I have been astonished at how little curiosity or even interest they have in the ways in which home-based education, particularly autonomous education, differs from school-based education.  They simply expect it to be the same, and expect that their knowledge and experience of schooling will be applicable to home education too.

Even if you decide to run a school at home set up, however, there are significant ways in which home based education may differ from school.  The most significant difference is that there is a lot less pressure for a child to be literate early in the home.  At school, where many of the activities are explained in work sheets or work books, there is a huge pressure on children to be literate as early as possible.  Some researchers have linked the increase in dyslexia and dyspraxia with this emphasis on early literacy, and certainly the amount of time that a child spends naturally running around, balancing, swinging, all the things which are suggested as ways of helping dyspraxic children, is naturally cut down if you have children sitting down trying to learn how to read.

If you are home educating, and available to your children, then most of the things which are done in school by reading can be done by talking.  Although local authority inspectors seem to have a superstition that children haven’t learned something unless they have written it down, this isn’t true.  People are perfectly capable of learning many things without writing any of them down.

At home, parents can put things into context for their children.  If they ask a question, in answering you will naturally draw upon what you know of their interests and experiences and help to make sense of whatever it is.  You don’t need to think about it, this is something which parents do naturally.  Teachers do too, but their knowledge of their pupils is limited by the number that they are trying to teach at one time.

In common with many people setting out to home educate, I initially had a plan and a timetable and intended to run a school at home.  I think probably that was helpful to the older two, as they had been in school, and it made a good transition from school to home.  But pretty rapidly I learned to trust that my children were learning and exploring and curious about the world, and we moved gradually from planned to unplanned, didactic to autonomous.

I fear that many of the people who are forced to home educate due to circumstances, don’t come into contact with ideas about autonomous education, which offers a whole new model of how people learn and why.  They are used to teacher-centred education, and believe that this is the model to aspire to.  In the case of parents who were not academic themselves at school, this puts a huge amount of pressure onto them to be the teacher, to learn the things that they want to teach to their children and to pass them on, just as in school.

It makes me sad that there is so little writing about the alternative, in which the parent is not the teacher, but the facilitator, and where the family can explore together, gaining more information and learning more where necessary.  I have found this to be a joyful experience, where we spark questions and then work to find answers together.  It’s a creative and inspiring process which has far more benefits than the alternative, where the parent seeks to learn the information and then to transmit it to children.

In the course of my first couple of years as a home educator, I began to realise how much I had been indocrinated in the course of my education, with the way in which things are normally done.  Splitting the world into subjects is something which may make sense in school, but in the home you begin to see the world in a much more integrated way, and realise that there is no way of separating maths and English and science from cookery.  You begin to see that explaning liquid measures with diagrams and numbers is so much less easy than doing it with jugs and bottles and jars.

Much of the difference in the autonomous approach, is that you trust the children to ask their own questions, and to find their own answers.  It can be a little unnerving if one of your children isn’t curious about reading for years (one of mine didn’t read well until 11) or if their curiosity centres around computer games and fast food… but once you understand the ways in which learning from firsthand experience differs from learning by being lectured, it is impossible to go back, I feel.

It is my vision, that as 3D worlds like Second Life expand, one could have a place where anyone can learn about anything, with no entry requirements, no exams to pass, no restrictions on the learning that one can do.  How mad is that, anyway?  We live in a culture that puts up barriers to progress in learning.  In order to be thought fit to learn one subject, you may have to jump through innumerable hoops in other subjects.  In my educational utopia, every school is like the teen challenge experience I have just participated in… children with freedom to attend a group session or do their own thing, hanging out with other teenagers, or finding something they want to do… with equipment and resources available when needed.

That’s a vision for the future, but meanwhile in the UK, it can be the reality for home educated children, if only parents know it is an option and that it works.

Home Educators across the Uk are being urged to write to their MPs to protest about forthcoming changes to the rules for benefits for lone parents in the UK.  As from November 2008, lone parents are required to switch to the Jobseekers’ Allowance when their youngest child reaches the age of 12, with the prospect of this age being dropped to seven in the future (2010). 

For lone parents who are caring for children with disabilities, or are home educating, these changes to the rules are very significant.  Transferring to Jobseekers’ Allowance means making oneself available for work, and may be patently impossible in the case of a child with complex needs.

I wrote to my MP some months ago when this change was originally discussed in the media, and received some very unsatisfactory replies from the Minister, Caroline Flint.  These seemed not to understand the problems with parents with children with severe disabilities may face in trying to find carers willing or able to care for their child.  In answer to my questions about home educating parents, the Minister suggested that home education need not take place within traditional school hours and therefore could be fitted around the required work - a useful reply for those already trying to argue that case with their local authority, but not much use for those who have children with complex needs.

Many families decide reluctantly to home educate because the alternatives they have been offered are unsuitable for the needs of their children, and some have such complex needs that some sort of respite for the carers in the family is an unattainable dream.  It seems completely outrageous that the Government should expect lone parents in that sort of situation to magically find appropriate (and affordable) childcare for their children in order to free them to take up employment. 

It was strongly suggested in the White Paper which was published last December, that parents fleeing from Domestic violence, parents caring for disabled children and home educating parents should not be subject to "increased conditionality".  That is, they should not be held to the change in rules which is proposed.  However, to date there has been no acceptance that flexibility must be worked into the arrangements for these children, and the situation remains that after Novermber 2008, lone parents must register for Jobseekers’ Allowance and therefore, be free to take up employment, irrespective of their commitments in the home.

If you are in the UK, please write to your MP, soliciting support for these families, and urging them to ask the government to incorporate some flexibility for parents caring for disabled children or home educating.  You may like to use the Write to them website, which assists you in contacting your local representatives.

For more information look at the Freedom for Children to Grow website.

My children are home educated, and usually spend one day a week at Camp Mohawk, in the wilds of Berkshire, just
outside Wargrave.  We’ve been coming to Camp Mohawk with varying degrees of regularity for about four years I think. 

We drive off down the A40 to the ancient A4 which runs between Maidenhead and Reading, turning off through Wargrave to
the twisty single-lane roads where one has to pull into a verge or (if you’re not careful) a ditch to let other vehicles pass by, amidst fields of crops contained by neat hedges and the odd fence.  Eventually one reaches Crazies Hill and a dirt track laced with flinty gravel leads up the hill past a working farmyard which doubles as a business centre, to the woods and Camp Mohawk.

It is a beautiful place.  Surrounded by deciduous trees which dwarf the wooden buildings, there are primroses and bluebells in the woods at the moment, some trees are shrouded in a light spring veil of leaves, and others are still quite bare except for some sticky buds.  A small wild rabbit hops out from a woodpile to graze on the new grass and skitters away again when I approach.  Above the camp if you carry on up the hill, is an ancient clearing encircled by beech trees, where your footsteps crackle with the ancient layers of discarded beech nut cases underfoot.  Here is it possible to believe that you have been transported back to pre-Roman times, often the only sounds being the occasional crack from the trees, and the echoing  voices of children, or the cry of the red kites wheeling overhead. 

Camp Mohawk was originally organised in a barely believable way…. It was intended as a holiday place for autistic children, run by the scouts, and townie scouts from the East end of London came to the camp and looked after autistic children, some of them pretty young, doing all the work, cooking, cleaning, required.  Some of the autistic children who still attend camp as teenagers, visited the camp when it was run by scouts. 

Unfortunately,the leader and founder of the Camp was prosecuted and jailed for child abuse, which must have been very distressing for both the volunteers and families attending the camp.  It seems pretty amazing in these days, when even adults are not supposed to go into the kitchen unless they have a hygiene certificate, that unqualified scouts from Beckton might be put in total charge of autistic children, some of them little more than babies. 

For a while it looked bleak for the centre, but fortunately Ian Cotton, who had been working as a volunteer at the centre for a year while doing research for a book about it, believed that there was something about Camp Mohawk that worked magic for autistic children.  He believed in the place so much that he agreed to take over as director in order to keep it open.

Ian was Director of the centre when we first started going there.  The centre was used by autistic children and their families in the evenings after school and at weekends, but it was empty during the week during the day (outside the holidays), and so a home education group had started to use it both in the summer and in the winter.  My children loved it.  It provided real freedom, a place where they could take off into the woods and build shelters or play games. 

During the summer, usually the parents sit in the sunshine on the outdoor chairs and tables which are scattered over the grassy area, close to the buildings, a cluster of low level wooden huts which make up the administrative heart of the centre, and the children have the run of the woods, and the football field, and adventure playground, overlooking the Berkshire countryside all around, as far as the eye can see.

The freedom that the place offers for children is quite unusual in these days, even for home educated children.  The dangers of the roads and the huge increase in the number of cars on our crowded island mean that younger children simply can’t be allowed to roam the streets, even if parents aren’t worried about the dangers of abduction etc.  Camp Mohawk offers a safe place where children can be free to go off on their own and enough space to make them feel that freedom.

The home education group has gradually expanded its use of the centre to encompass classes over the winter months, when Camp Mohawk as a centre for children on the autistic spectrum is usually closed. They also use it during the months from Easter to September, when it has traditionally been open.  Twice a year, at Easter and in the October half-term, the home education group open the doors to the other groups who use the centre and some strangers too, and run Teen Challenge.  This consists of four days running around the woods, playing football, chatting, hanging out around the centre, with some organised sessions of activities, and drop-in arts activities too. 

Last week, there was a base of home educated children, a group of Crossroads teenagers who come to every teen challenge, some of the autistic teenagers who attend camp normally and a smattering of schoolchildren who usually are related to or friendly with children in the other groups.  They were able to choose to participate in group activities like shelter building and survival skills, football training, rock climbing, orienteering and laser quest, or to hang out around camp, listening to music, talking, playing basketball or playing computer games. 

While there wasn’t a lot of crossover between groups - the teenagers mostly stayed in the groups of friends they knew best - the groups came together for some of the more popular activities, and collaborated together in a very natural way.  I was dreading the weather - we had heavy snowfall on Sunday at home, and more sleet and snow predicted, but we were very lucky - it was mostly cold but sunny.

I spent a lot of time running drop-in art activities in the art room, and had cunningly brought a heater from home to keep me warm.  On the first day, which was bitterly cold, it provided refuge for those who were too cold to continue outside… groups came and decorated boxes, made hangings for a peace tree, and started bracelets.

It’s hard to explain how wonderful it is to see such a diverse group of teenagers in one place.  In general we have always found Camp Mohawk to be a tolerant and accepting place, but this is a poor way to describe how very positive it is, how free and how welcoming. The freedom to participate or to watch, to choose to do what everyone else was doing, or to find something other, is something that traditional approaches barely allow for autistic children, and they might be expected to dislike it.  They don’t appear to however, and there was barely a ripple of discontent over the course of the four days from anyone.

The Camp has a core of staff and volunteers, who are around and about for those who need them.  One of the volunteers,
Huxley, came and showed a couple of reluctant boys how to convert a washing line peg into a useful clip for the fridge.  After a few words of encouragement they enthusiastically converted one into a penguin and the other into a savage wolf.

The final day included laser quest among the woods, a fancy dress competition and disco, with an open fire offering an
alternative for those who like to retain some useful hearing.  My children all agreed that the final day was "awesome" and all of them enjoyed it.

The centre is always short of money and welcomes donations, which can be sent care of Luke Janssen at Camp Mohawk,
Crazies Hill, Wargrave, Berkshire, RG10 8PU

School-leavers should be encouraged to swear an oath of allegiance to Queen and country, says a report commissioned by Gordon Brown on British citizenship.

Report author, ex-attorney general Lord Goldsmith, says it would give teenagers a sense of belonging.

Council tax and student fee rebates are suggested for people who volunteer - as well as a "Britishness" public holiday.

The PM’s spokesman said he welcomed the "interesting" review, adding that it had sparked "quite a lively debate".

However, John Dunford from the Association of School and College leaders said the citizenship ceremony was "a half-baked idea".

Lord Goldsmith wants a British national day by 2012.

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Teachers want homework to be abolished for primary school age children.

A motion for the Association of Teachers and Lecturers conference will also seek a Royal Commission to examine why children are unhappy at school.

Union leader Mary Bousted said the difficulty of completing homework could set up a cycle of resistance to school in children from poorer homes.

The government says that homework is not compulsory but it is encouraged as a key part of the learning process.

The amount of homework set is often an issue for parents.

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Fraser Nelson reports on the radical Swedish system of independent state schools, financed by vouchers, that has transformed the country’s education performance and is now inspiring the Conservative party’s dramatic blueprint for British schools: to set them free.

This summer, at least 25,000 children will drop out of English schools without a single qualification to show for their years of compulsory education. Some 240,000 will graduate from primary school unable to read or write properly. By autumn, some 250 schools judged to be failing will welcome an intake of new pupils. Youth unemployment will probably hit an 11-year high. It will, tragically, be just another year in one of the world’s highest-funded education systems.

Two strategies are available to David Cameron in addressing this scandal, should he get to No. 10. He could perform his own surgery on the comprehensive system pretending, as all prime ministers pretend, that he can actually control it. The Local Education Authorities, with whom the power rests, would almost certainly ignore him, as they did Tony Blair. But the second policy would be a new one. He would invite anyone to set up a new state school, run it independently of government, and receive a sum likely to be more than £6,000 a pupil.

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Increasing numbers of children claim they carry knives and bottles to defend themselves against bullies, according to a report based on children in care.

The document was written by Roger Morgan, the children’s rights director for England, who said bullying by mobile phones and websites was rising.

It says more children carry weapons, but children’s minister Kevin Brennan said knife incidents remain "rare".

Two-thirds of the 319 children surveyed said bullying was getting worse.

Mr Morgan, who is based at the education watchdog Ofsted, said: "Bullying was once considered the domain of the school playground.

"But more and more children and young people we spoke to are now suffering at the hands of bullies in many places - at home, in the classroom, in the street, and now even online."

Bullying often extends beyond fights to the internet.

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· Tests and targets make parents seek alternatives
· Pupils in England ‘most tested in the world’

Parents are increasingly seeking alternative forms of education such as home schooling or Steiner schools to free their children from the state sector’s regime of testing and targets, academics suggest today. Most English pupils now start formal learning at four years old, among the youngest in the world, and go on to be the most tested throughout their education, according to a series of in-depth reports which will feed into a major review of primary schooling by Cambridge University.

Many parents are now considering alternative forms of education and more are opting to home-educate their children. The government should learn from the way children are taught in alternative settings such as Steiner schools where they learn through play, the academics say.

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The parents of two boys who needed hospital treatment after bullying incidents have said a Kent school is not doing enough to protect pupils.

Sebastian Groves, 13, and Kieran Hunt, 15, were assaulted at or on their way home from The Howard School in Rainham.

"I don’t feel I can trust the school to look after Kieran’s or any student’s welfare," said his father, Alex Hunt.

Head teacher Paul Morris said behaviour had improved in recent years and bullying was being tackled effectively.

The Howard School in Medway is a single sex comprehensive with 1,500 boys aged 11-18.

Figures obtained by BBC South East Today show there were 108 fixed-term exclusions from the school last year for physical assault.

There were 143 exclusions for verbal abuse or threatening behaviour.

Sebastian described incidents of physical bullying: "I had my ribs broken because someone thought it was funny to push me up a flight of stairs - people were suffocating me.

Sebastian Groves is now being educated at a specialist school.

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