European Sociological Association Annual Conference 2019

Martin Myers (Presented paper)

School of Education & Sociology

Activity: Participating in or organising an event types › Participation in conference

Description of Activity

Presented paper on 'Education and Migration'

Period	2019
Event type	Conference
Location	Manchester, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International

Keywords

Muslim
Risk
Risk Society
Home education
Home Schooling
Race
Religion

Documents & Links

This paper examines the experiences of Muslim families who choose to home school their children drawing upon a larger project exploring a diverse range of home schoolers. The work of Ulrich Beck (1992, 2006) is used to discuss how ‘risk’ is understood for Muslim homeschoolers often by conflating global fears of Islamification within local settings such as schools. Home schooling in the UK is subject to very low thresholds of regulation and this has increasingly led to concerns about child safeguarding and educational outcomes. There has been a noticeable trend however, for identifications of home schooled children being ‘at risk’, to seemingly reflect preconceptions about ethnicity, class or religious affiliation (Bhopal and Myers, 2018) Often Ethnic minority and poorer homeschoolers, are more readily identified as putting their children ‘at risk’ than their white, middle class counterparts. Muslim homeschoolers have been singled out by the schools inspectorate OFSTED as putting their children ‘at risk’ by using the lax regulation of home schooling as ‘cover’ for radicalising children. This has emerged against wider political and media discourses in which Muslims are portrayed as promoting narrow, religious curriculums out of step with mainstream society. Our findings suggest that many Muslim homeschoolers, like other BME families, use it as a strategy avoid racism within schools. A vicious circle emerges in which Muslim children encounter racism and bullying at school because of their religious background, causing families to withdraw children from school, which feeds further narratives in which Muslim communities are demonised.

European Sociological Association Annual Conference 2019

Description of Activity

Keywords

Documents & Links

Related content

Research outputs

Muslims, home education and risk in British society

Home Schooling and Home Education: Race, Class and Inequality