Faced with the insurmountable difficulty of judging thousands of different educational provisions, local authorities have been moving inexorably towards a concentration on four main areas; Numeracy, Literacy, Progress, and Socialisation.
Your child may be excelling in dance or ecology or sociology or just in being a lovely person but are they increasingly numerate and literate. And the problem is, often – due to the influence of school based curricula – what they mean by numeracy, literacy, progress and socialisation is maths, english, tests and peers.
The EHEapp is based on a much broader understanding of these concepts and we’re going to explore why. We’ll also explore why we added STEM and Life Skills.
Numeracy
A good place to start is numeracy – the National Numeracy Charity provide the following definition:-
“Numeracy means understanding how mathematics is used in the real world and being able to apply it to make the best possible decisions…It’s as much about thinking and reasoning as about ‘doing sums’”
National Numeracy Charity
So numeracy is primarily about understanding the maths of ‘the real world’. The important point here is to understand that maths – the subject taught in schools – itself is not numeracy. Maths is an abstraction of numeracy. If you’re interested and motivated, maths is a brilliant way of developing numeracy skills as an abstraction which may well help with real world numeracy, but an equally great way is to simply develop numeracy skills directly; cut up cakes, follow recipes, share play dough, go shopping.
For some children abstract numeracy (maths) is an engaging activity in its own right but for others the abstraction gets in the way and makes ‘maths’ feel pointless and difficult. Actual numeracy never feels pointless – sharing playdough matters even if you don’t want to; the quantities in a recipe matter; the balance in your bank account matters; the distance to the campsite ‘are we nearly there yet’ really matters.
Developing skills in a way that actually matters and makes sense to a child will almost always work; developing skills in a more abstracted way can sometimes work brilliantly and can lead to lifelong interests and opportunities, but, for many of us, the abstractions impede understanding and lead to dislike and disaffection.
What the EHEapp does is allow all types of numeracy to be evidenced. Whatever your child is doing – whether an online maths class or out shopping – if it requires numerical skills then it counts as ‘doing numeracy’ and the count is simply weighted to reflect the numerical content of the activity.
Literacy
The National Literacy Trust provides this definition for literacy:-
“Literacy is the ability to read, write, speak and listen in a way that lets us communicate effectively and make sense of the world.”
The National Literacy Trust
Again, exactly like numeracy, the context given is the world – making sense, interacting with, and understanding the world we live in. And, just like numeracy, this real world context can be abstracted into a subject that can be taught and easily tested, the English taught at schools . But this English is not literacy – literacy is much broader in its scope and covers almost every interaction we have with the real world – being able to follow IKEA instructions, or understanding that 5 star reviews don’t necessarily mean a product is great, or knowing that posts on social media don’t always represent reality, or understanding a dialect – the list is endless.
So while the alliteration used by Emily Bronte in her poetry is amazing and well worth studying, it is perhaps not the most effective way to help develop skills to communicate and make sense of the world we live in. There are an infinite number of ways to learn to communicate with and make sense of the world, arguably the most effective is just to go out and interact with it a lot. You can learn a lot about Lego by reading instruction manuals but most people would agree that you can learn even more by actually playing with the bricks. Both are good, but it’s difficult to argue that the former is better.
The EHEapp uses this much broader scope to allow you to record whatever you are doing and, if the activity has literacy content, then the EHEapp reflects the element of literacy in your child’s journal.
Progress
“By progress, we mean pupils knowing more and remembering more. Has a child really gained the knowledge to understand the key concepts and ideas?”
Ofsted’s National Director of Education
Probably unbeknown to most home educators there’s been an argument going on in schools and OFSTED about progress. In 2012 the OFSTED descriptor suggested that to achieve an outstanding designation progress should be “rapid and sustained” – this led to schools piling on ever greater amounts of new content at an increasingly rapid pace to get the badge. In 2015 even OFSTED could see the way this was skewing things and so they changed the descriptor to ‘substantial and sustained’ in an attempt to get schools to slow down and make sure some of this stuff was actually going in. The quote above is from 2019 and reflects this shift but it begs the question – Knowing more what? Remembering more what? The key concepts to what exactly?
These questions bring us back to literacy and numeracy – because ultimately what this is all about is developing the skills that will allow a child to function well in our society; with respect to a local authority view of education, that is to develop the numeracy and literacy skills necessary to function well in society. As an example we could study maths and show progress in our mathematical skill with quadratic equations. However, while learning the formula for quadratic equations is fun and interesting in its own right, it’s only achieving a useful skill in the real world for a very small number of people. So progress, like the literacy and numeracy it’s purportedly measuring, encompasses the entire gamut of activities that literacy and numeracy themselves cover – literally everything we do in the real world with our children.
So what does this look like? It looks like your child understanding something – anything. Do they understand the concepts behind getting an IKEA wooden dowel into a too small hole? Do they understand how to get it out again when they realise it was the wrong hole? Do they know how to return something bought on Amazon? Do they know how to weed a flower bed? Do they know why the leaves fall off trees in autumn? Do they… well the list is basically infinite.
We reflect this in the EHEapp; we’ve put in a little light bulb button that you can use to highlight any activity as showing progress. If your child knows something they didn’t before then this is progress. If your child reinforces an idea by using it again and embedding the concepts further then this is progress. If your child then forgets this thing and learns it all over again then this is also progress. Just keep clicking the lightbulb.
Socialisation
Finally we come to socialisation. One of the ironies of home education is that we are tasked with proving that our children are being appropriately socialised when almost all of us know home educators who home educate precisely because schools failed them so badly due to bullying.
The good news is that the socialisation we provide our children doesn’t in anyway have to mirror the frankly awful socialisation found in many schools. Anytime our children interact with anyone, whether family or community they are socialising. Children who grow up on isolated islands aren’t socially dysfunctional because the primary socialisation of all children is usually the family. The fact that home educated children get to spend more time with the people who love them and model loving respectful behaviour is one of the many superpowers that home educators have.
The EHEapp reflects this much broader definition of socialisation. Most of the activity tags have a socialisation element which reflects the fact that very few things happen in isolation in a home educating family.
STEM and Life Skills
If you start using the EHEapp you’ll see that we have also included STEM and Life Skills. You may be wondering why we added these when local authorities aren’t actually asking for evidence of them. The answer is because this app isn’t actually for local authorities; it’s for home educating families and for many home educators life skills and science and technology skills are a key reason why they home educate and by including them we are giving these home educators some feedback on how this part of their child’s education is going.