Children Should Never Be Educated at Home by Their Parents - IELTS Task 2 Band 9 Essays

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Sample Essay 1

Compulsory schooling is often seen as the default, prompting the claim that children should never be taught at home by their parents. I disagree with this absolutist view. While parental education can deliver highly tailored instruction and pastoral care, it also risks narrow socialisation and patchy academic breadth. This essay weighs both the advantages and disadvantages before rejecting a blanket prohibition.

When executed with expertise and external oversight, home education can be academically potent. One-to-one teaching allows precise diagnosis of gaps, mastery learning, and agile pacing—anxious or advanced learners are neither rushed nor bored. Curricula can be integrated with a child’s passions—coding, chamber music, robotics—so motivation and metacognition rise together. Flexibility benefits families in remote areas, elite young athletes, or pupils with specific learning differences who thrive with structured routines and frequent feedback. Parents can also curate safer environments for children temporarily struggling with bullying or chronic illness. Modern resources—MOOCs, open textbooks, community college modules—mean parents need not be polymaths; they can coordinate tutors and organised clubs while still providing daily accountability. Where portfolios are moderated and progress is benchmarked against public standards, outcomes can equal or surpass those of conventional classrooms.

Yet the model carries structural hazards that are easy to underestimate. School is not only about content; it is a dense peer ecology where children learn to negotiate conflict, collaborate with diverse classmates, and encounter worldviews beyond the family’s orbit. Homeschooling can confine pupils to intellectual echo chambers or a parent’s blind spots: chemistry without labs, languages without immersion, history without plural sources. Assessment may be impressionistic, apprentice-style, and vulnerable to halo effects; without external exams or moderation, gaps stay invisible until university entry, when applicants may lack referees, lab experience, or evidence of deadlines met under pressure. Safeguarding and work–life boundaries also blur at home, and outcomes become highly unequal: a well-networked household can assemble rich experiences, while others—despite goodwill—cannot. In short, benefits hinge on resources, competence, and scrutiny.

In sum, homeschooling is neither panacea nor peril per se. With rigorous external assessment and deliberate community engagement, it can serve some children exceptionally well; without those guardrails, it should be discouraged. Therefore, the word “never” is indefensible: regulated possibility, not prohibition, best serves young people.

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Sample Essay 2

Calls to outlaw parental homeschooling ignore its complex trade-offs. I disagree with an absolute ban. This essay argues, first, that learning at home can maximise time-efficiency and enable authentic, project-based study difficult to orchestrate in mass schooling; second, that it can also sever children from institutional networks, impartial certification, and specialised services that shape scholarships, careers, and civic belonging.

Home education can reclaim hours for deep work and unlock authentic, project-based learning. Commuting, timetable gaps, and whole-class transitions vanish, creating long, interruption-free blocks where a child can pursue demanding goals: drafting a novella across a term, building a microcontroller-driven weather station, or rehearsing four hours daily before recording an audition portfolio. Families can braid disciplines around real problems—budgeting for a small garden enterprise brings mathematics, rhetoric, and ethics together—while bilingual households preserve heritage languages through daily immersion. Because scheduling is elastic, teenagers can take weekday apprenticeships with a ceramicist or coder, volunteer at a local archive, or enter hackathons and youth parliaments that reward initiative rather than seat-time. External anchors—music grade exams, science fairs, debating circuits, private-candidate syllabuses, or competition results—can provide hard evidence of attainment. In such designs, pupils practise self-management, version control, and long-horizon planning that many school timetables unintentionally disrupt.

Conversely, homeschooling can narrow opportunity structures by severing pupils from institutional ecosystems. Schools are not merely classrooms; they are pipelines to lab access, team sports, orchestras, Olympiad selection, and teacher referees—credentials universities and employers trust because they come from neutral adults who see hundreds of candidates. Outside that web, a talented chemist may lack supervised lab hours, a striker may miss district trials ring-fenced for school teams, and a scholarship may require a counsellor’s report a parent cannot credibly supply. Specialist provision—speech therapy, exam access arrangements, safeguarding checks—can be harder to coordinate privately, and administrative burdens fall unevenly, often on mothers, entrenching inequality. Moreover, the evaluative ecology shifts: parental assessment risks real or perceived leniency, while irregular contact with diverse peers and authoritative deadlines can leave students under-rehearsed for gatekept environments. Co-ops mitigate these gaps, but their quality tracks postcode and disposable income, widening disparities.

In sum, “never” is an imprudent rule. Where families deliver time-efficient, project-rich study and pair it with impartial examinations, community participation, and specialist supports, homeschooling can thrive; without those external moorings, it risks shrinking horizons. A stance of regulated openness—permission with strong guardrails—best serves young people.

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