European Conference on Educational Research Annual conference of the European Educational Research Association

Muslim families, home education and risk

This paper examines the experiences of Muslim families who choose to home educate their children. Drawing on 10 case studies with Muslim families from a larger study exploring the experiences of a diverse range of home educators (including middle class families, families whose children had special educational needs, families from different religious backgrounds and different ethnicities). The work of Ulrich Beck (1992, 2006) is used to discuss how ‘risk’ is understood in relation to home education generally and Muslim home educators specifically.

Many families choose home education in response to identifying risks associated with schooling; simultaneously home educators themselves are often identified as putting their children ‘at risk’ (Bhopal and Myers, 2018). These already ambiguous patterns of risk, sit within more complex narratives in which different types of family are identified as being more or less likely to put their children ‘at risk’ depending on their class or ethnicity (Bhopal and Myers, 2016). Muslim home educating families were identified by OFSTED (2016) as putting children ‘at risk’ of radicalisation.