Part-time and Flexi-Schooling

Common sense would suggest one of the simplest and most effective ways of improving the educational provision for school age children would be to make part-time and flexi-schooling widely available.

It is a system that works well in adult education and there is no reason why children should not be given the same choices.

This would involve parents being able choose what days and how many hours per day their children went to school; parents and children being able to pick specific courses that they wanted to attend; parents attending lessons with their children; the provision of high-quality specialist tuition for a few hours per week for home-schooling families and providing specialist facilities - such as libraries, laboratories, computers, sports facilities and  gardens - for children that are not in full-time school.

These arrangements would undoubtedly be cost-effective in educational terms and would be welcomed by teachers in so far as it would allow them to teach smaller groups of better motivated children and would prevent them being used as child minders.

The fact that these sorts of initiatives are not being seriously explored by the state education sector is because people have become locked into the idea that schools have to be full-time - presumably so that mothers and fathers can go to work. 

If educational provision was based solely on what was best for children, then high-quality part-time and flexible schooling would be the thing that everyone was rushing to provide.

State Provision
I don't know of a single example of the where the state has made a serious effort to provide good facilities for part-time or flexible schooling. It is definitely something that they could do - they have the expertise. Many local authorities run special centres for children excluded from school which children only attend a few hours per week and  they receive one-to-one attention. These centres work well but instead of using them as a blueprint for wider use, local authorities try to move children out of them as quickly as possible and back into the schools that were causing them all the problems in the first place.

It is my belief that these sorts of facilities could be made to cost no more than conventional school if they were run as a partnership between parents and teachers - with parents coming in with their children so that the ratio of adults to children was always one-to-one. It is more a lack of imagination and courage than a lack of money that prevents progress in this field.

I have heard of cases in which individual children are allowed to attend the local school on a part-time basis and are taught at home for the rest of the time. As far as I can see this is only feasible if you have a happy school and the teacher concerned is committed to making it work - otherwise the full-time pupils will resent the freedom enjoyed by the part-time pupil.

Link:
flexi-schooling - a parent describes how they have made flexible-schooling work plus a downloadable information pack.

Private Arrangements
Privately organised part-time schooling, perhaps arising from groups of home-educators working together, is, however, a very feasible  option.

In the United States, where there are more homeschooling families and where there are stronger local networks of home-educators, these sorts of arrangements are common.

Children do not need many hours per week of actual tuition and a small amount of the right sort of mental stimulation can alter their whole week. Part-time school arranged by home-educating families can take more or less any form. It can just involve everyone getting together without any set plan of study  or, at the other extreme, it can involve someone actually conducting lessons in predetermined subjects  for a certain number of hours per week.

This sort of arrangement can be very useful for parents who want to be involved in their children's education but who are worried about their own competence to teach certain subjects.

Link:
The Otherwise Club - home schooling families in the London area who hire a hall and use it for social and educational activites.

Legal points - If a significant number of parents are always present in a part-time or flexible school then there is no legal question involved - it no different from any other situation in which parents get together with their children.

If, on the other hand, one or two people are regularly left in charge of five or more children of school age, then they are technically running a school and should notify the Department of Education. This may seem to be rather irksome but I did it myself on two separate occasions in the early 1990s and it was not too bad. If more people did it the government would have to change the system to make it more sensible.

For up-to-date information on this subject  consult the Human Scale Education website.

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