Becoming a Home-Educator in a Networked World: Towards the Democratisation of Education Alternatives?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The internet is assumed to play a special role in UK home-education and has apparently fuelled an increase its prevalence. This paper reports the place and purpose of the internet, online networks and offline communities in the decision to home-educate amongst parents in England, Scotland and Wales. The research formed part of a mixed-method doctoral study that included: an online survey of 242 home-educators; 52 individual and group interviews with 85 parents, children and young people and a week-long participant observation with families. The sample included a range of both ‘new’ and ‘experienced’ home-educators. The findings show that online and offline networking helped prospective parents to learn of home-education as a viable and positive alternative to schooled provision. For parents, socialising with existing home-educators was pivotal for cultivating a sense of identity, belonging and commitment to an education without school. At the same time, becoming a legitimate home-educator was a complex achievement; hinged upon social and economic resources and cultural competencies. Evidence of exclusionary practices among home-educators both online and offline, challenges the extent to which home-education is truly more ‘open’ now than it once was. In the decision to home-educate, it is concluded that the democratising potential of the internet points to ‘old wine in new bottles’.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it