How many home educated children take GCSEs?

Home education survey part 4: What are home educators' plans for their children's next steps?

I’ve written recently about the issues around exam centre availability and access arrangements for home educated children who want to take exams like GCSEs - but how many children are being affected by this?

We know roughly how many home educated children are in years 10 and 11, when they’re most likely to be thinking about GCSEs - about 32,000 as of Autumn 2023, and all the indications are that it will be higher when the latest figures are released. However it’s not usually the case that home educated children take all their exams at the end of year 11, with a similar pattern of subjects as they would in school. There are various reasons for this which are covered in-depth in this 30-minute presentation:

But the quick version is: exams cost a lot, they are often complicated to arrange, some subjects are largely impossible, others require private candidates to take the International GCSE version rather than the GCSE; and it’s also often considered a more pleasant experience to take only the subjects that are most necessary or interesting, and to focus on a few at a time. So all in all, partly through choice and largely through necessity, home educators will tend to take fewer subjects spread out over multiple exam sittings, with some starting from year 8 or 9, and others continuing for another year or so after year 11 before moving on to post-16 settings or other routes - although most take them in year 10 and 11. There’s also no requirement to take GCSE exams at all - other than entry requirements to the next stage of education, training or employment (which is often a pretty compelling reason!).

There are no official, complete, statistics on how many home educated children in the UK do take GCSEs or equivalents, or what their outcomes are. Although they don’t routinely publish the information, Ofqual could tell us about exam entries and results for private candidates - but not all private candidates are home educated, and not all home educated children sit exams as private candidates. They would also only cover GCSEs, and not their International GCSE equivalents, so would miss many of the key results.

LAs also don’t routinely collect this information. Home educating families may choose to tell them about any early GCSE passes or their plans, as part of responding to informal inquiries about the education taking place - but they don’t have to, and the LA duty to identify children not receiving a suitable education only applies while the child is of Compulsory School Age. So by the time they are at the end of year 11, there’s no need for parents to pass on any more information.

Even if this information was available, it wouldn’t easily link up over different years to provide a full picture of overall outcomes, and those outcomes wouldn’t be directly comparable to those in school for another host of reasons, including barriers to exam access, and the different reasons that families choose to home educate in the first place, which mean you are not comparing a like population.

And of course there’s a separate question of whether exam results are a key outcome measure anyway, as many home educators would say they are more concerned about their child’s overall character, resilience, happiness, health, relationships, enjoyment of learning, self-motivation, work ethic, or a whole variety of other, harder to quantify, measures of success.

However, many home educated children do take GCSEs, and go on to post-16 education (including continuing to home educate), university, and jobs. And others move on to post-16 routes that don’t require a particular set of GCSEs for entry (after all, many schooled children don’t get the magic grade 4s).

I know this partly because some of my own children and many of their home educated friends have (and others are still in the process); and partly because I, along with many others, participate in the peer support networks of home educating families going through the process of exams. These include the wonderful community run Wiki, webinars, and Facebook support groups. One long running group focused solely on home educators taking exams currently has 25,000 members. A couple of years ago I started a group just for home educators self-studying Maths GCSEs, and it now has 1600 members.

But as part of my survey earlier this year, I wanted to get something a little more concrete on what home educating families’ plans were for exams and future paths. As a reminder, this was an in-depth survey, shared as widely as possible, that received responses from across the UK, reflecting the experiences of 1220 children who were (at least at that point) currently home educated. While all families were asked the question, in looking at responses I’m only going to consider the 681 that were about secondary-aged children; GCSEs and post-16 plans are a bit of a nebulous thing when you have a 5-year-old!

I asked: “Do you expect this child will take any formal qualifications at the GCSE level (not necessarily at age 16)?”, with a series of multiple choice options, and also gave the opportunity for a free text explanation. Respondents could select more than one response. The responses given were as follows.

Yes - expect them to take Maths and English GCSEs alongside a post-16 course: 50 (7%)
Yes - expect them to take Functional Skills qualifications whilst home educated: 65 (10%)
Yes - expect them to take 5 or more GCSEs whilst home educated: 136 (20%)
Yes - expect them to take 1-5 GCSEs whilst home educated: 158 (23%)
Yes - expect them to go into school to take GCSEs: 10 (1%)
Yes - expect them to attend 14-16 college to obtain GCSEs: 66 (10%)
Too far away to know: 56 (4%)
They have already taken at least 1 GCSE: 48 (7%)
They have already taken Maths or English Functional Skills: 9 (1%)
They are booked to take at least 1 GCSE within the next year: 60 (9%)
No - I don't currently think this will be possible due to cost/difficulty finding a centre: 21 (3%)
No - I don't currently think this will be possible due to child's ability to access exams: 49 (7%)
No - I don't believe formal qualifications at GCSE level are necessary: 21 (3%)
It will depend on the child at the time: 233 (34%)

As many responses fell into multiple categories, I then broke down these responses into larger groups, with each response only counting in one group.

Definitely take qualifications: 13.8%
Planning to take while home educating: 39.1%
Planning to take at school or college: 5.6%
Planning to take post-16: 3.7%
Not planning: 11%
Maybe: 26.9%

Overall, about 60% of the respondents were expecting to take some qualifications, only 10% didn’t expect to (with very few of these doing so as a deliberate choice), and the other 30% were not yet sure either way. (Recall this was all respondents with children currently from year 7 to year 11.)

So, certainly the majority of home educated children would at least like the opportunity to take GCSEs.

And what results do they get when they do? As covered in the earlier discussion, there’s no official data on this, and it’s even harder to get an overall picture just by asking, as survey responses are likely to be heavily skewed towards those who have done well, and won’t cover those who didn’t take any at all. So please don’t quote this as the overall outcomes for the whole home educated population - it won’t be. The best we can manage is whether good results are possible, and the answer to that is: yes, absolutely. A survey collecting Summer 2024 exam experiences for HEQA included data on the results of 233 Level 2 exam entries (primarily GCSEs) by home educated candidates - and 50% achieved grade 7 or higher.

From what we can tell, while it’s vitally important to keep in mind that this is and should remain an individual choice, most home educators want their children to have the opportunity to take exams, and they are perfectly able to do well in them when they do - however in some cases the barriers to do so are around access to exam centres; and these fall disproportionately on those on a low income and with additional support needs. While this remains the case, it’s also important that those making future decisions based on qualifications - post-16 and universities in particular - are aware of the context home educators are working in; and that if possible, catch-up opportunities are built into the post-16 system.