A Class of their Own

17 April  2005, The Observer
All rights reserved © 2005 Louise France
(Reproduced here by kind permission)

It used to be seen as weird and a little cranky. But a growing number of ordinary parents are opting to teach their children at home. Louise France meets a generation of 'unschoolers', and reports on some of the important lessons mainstream education can learn from them

It's a Wednesday morning and Caroline Spear's four daughters are busy. Thirteen-year-old Freya has been looking up the lifecycle of the squid, but now she's dancing to punk band Bowling for Soup in the living room. Zsofia, 11, has caught the bus into nearby Bognor Regis with her friend Jane. Eight-year-old Erica works on the computer (Smokey the pet rat draped around her shoulders) and Iona, six, is in the bath. As the day goes by the girls will talk about - among other things - whether or not gay people should be allowed in the Navy, where to buy the best chocolate raisins, how to make a polyhedron and the likelihood of Zsofia being stopped for suspected truanting by the police on her shopping trip.

'S'fine,' says Zsofia when she gets back. She's more interested in showing us the earrings she's bought. 'One woman asked me why we weren't at school, but I explained. It was cool.'

Caroline's daughters are among an estimated 170,000 children who are educated at home in England and Wales (it's impossible to find accurate figures because some families never register their children). It was the 1944 Education Act that enshrined the idea of free schooling open to everyone up to the age of 15. Forty years later, when I was a teenager, the idea of not going to school was almost unheard of. Home-educated children were seen as either prodigiously gifted or awfully strange; their parents dismissed as cranks with blackboards and Bunsen burners. Today, few subjects obsess parents more than education, yet more and more of them, from diverse occupations and backgrounds, are taking their children out of the classroom.

Caroline used to work in development training. Her husband, Marco, is an electronics engineer. Their daughters are polite, noisy, thoughtful, chatty, confident, opinionated - pretty much like most girls. The family live on a quiet estate in West Sussex. A room at the back of the house is lined with posters of the kings and queens of England and the solar system. There's a fish tank, a cage for Smokey and a table covered in safety glass that they can write on, then wipe down.

'Not enough parents understand the law. They presume that not sending your child to school is illegal,' explains Caroline, who began home educating as a result of Freya being unhappy at primary school. 'They presume you have to be a teacher, or have a degree. That you have to live in a big house and have lots of money. They presume you're weird. None of these things is true.'

Many of this new generation call themselves 'unschoolers', believing that what happens in the classroom doesn't always translate to the kitchen table. Caroline ticks me off when I describe the children as being 'home schooled'. 'I don't like the world "school",' she says. 'School is about doing what you are told. It's about timetables, rules, being put down by teachers. I don't panic when they play. One of them might play all day and then go to bed with a book. They're learning from the moment they wake to the moment they sleep.'

Sometimes they join other home educators for self-defence classes, creative maths, trips to Stonehenge. 'Because we aren't tied to term times, they can explore places without having to rush around with clipboards.' A science tutor arrives every month.

Marco had more doubts than his wife when she first suggested home education. He was anxious that they wouldn't reach exam level in subjects such as maths, and that they'd miss out on school facilities. Now he says he's talked to enough home-educated children to believe these are not problems. Sometimes he worries that they're not acquiring the discipline of formal learning, but he enjoys the fact his daughters aren't always tucked up in bed when he gets home. 'In a way, they are receiving the attention a child at public school would get,' he says.

Section 7 of the Education Act 1996 (England and Wales) reads: 'The parent of every child of compulsory school age shall cause him to receive efficient full-time education suitable: a. to his age, ability and aptitude, and b. to any special educational needs he may have, either by regular attendance at school or otherwise.'

It's the word 'otherwise' that provides the legal loophole for parents who want to home educate. Indeed, if a child has never been registered at school, parents don't even need to tell the authorities what they are doing.

In America, there is a long tradition of home educating. They are mostly either evangelical Christians or secular families unhappy, for different reasons, about the way religion is taught. In Britain, the motivation is rarely to do with faith. Bullying has traditionally been a catalyst. But increasingly it's a reaction to more regulation in schools, from Sats tests to literacy strategies. Home education experts cite the turning point as the 1988 Education Act, which introduced the National Curriculum. Anecdotally, I hear of a local education officer whose caseload has increased by 800 per cent in two years.

Kate Mosse, author and founder of the Orange Prize for Fiction, has two children - Martha, 15, who happily goes to school and Felix, 12, who happily studies at home. 'My husband and I are in favour of exams - and Felix will take them at 16 and 18, like Martha - but we were worried about the number of tests Felix was taking even at junior school, not least because of how much time was wasted preparing for tests rather than being used for teaching. State education has become increasingly geared towards a narrow curriculum, leaving little time for improvisation.'

Unlike most home-educating families, it's Kate's husband Greg - a former teacher - who takes most of the responsibility for tuition, with help from Kate ('I'm the sporadic supply teacher') and her mother-in-law who, among other things, 'knows the name of every plant and bird in the garden'.

Kate believes her son's education has more depth and variety than it did in school. She calls their approach 'lateral teaching'. The day starts with maths problems in the car when Martha is dropped off at school. Back home, Felix might have a cooking lesson and a French lesson rolled into one, or practise computer skills while writing a book review. 'State education has become more homogenous,' argues Kate, a former school governor. 'Obviously, schools can't allow each individual child to concentrate on learning in the way that suits them best. Because Felix can follow his instincts, he's freer to explore subjects. Straightforward lessons seem dull now.'

Mike Fortune-Wood has 12 years' experience of home education through teaching his children at home and running one of the many HE websites. He's in the middle of a long-term project researching home educators for a series of books. 'In the first year most say it's a problem with the school. But after two years they say they can see their children flourishing and it becomes a positive choice.'

Critics might think they're naive or gung ho, but these are parents who are convinced of their abilities and instincts. New technology, they argue, means knowledge is no longer the preserve of a remote authority figure standing in front of a blackboard. They're willing to sacrifice both time and a salary. While grandparents are often horrified by the idea, this is a generation increasingly distrustful of large institutions. They really believe that they can do a better job. As Fortune-Wood says, 'Ofsted has failed to notice the major change in the UK population. They are consumers now and they don't want off-the-peg education. They want something that is individual in a greater way than the government can provide. They want education by invitation, not compulsion.'

It was all very different in the Eighties when ex-teacher and university lecturer Roland Meighan went to court to defend the rights of families to home educate. 'There were only about 20 families that I could find home educating back then. It was an act of faith. Now there is evidence that it works. Many parents were former teachers. These days more "amateurs" have the confidence to give it a go.'

Iris Harrison is in her sixties now and her four children have grown up. But she vividly recalls her battle to educate them. 'I told my Local Education Authority that they were like the Gestapo,' she says. 'They were out to destroy us.' When Iris was told by teachers that three of her children were dyslexic and would never be able to read and write, she decided to educate them herself. The authorities threatened to put the children into care.

With her husband Geoff, who owned a building business, the family gave up their comfortable life in Cheltenham and fled to a Scottish island. 'We lived in a hut with a tin roof and barely any running water. You had to catch a boat to get to the nearest shop. My daughter learned to read from Thompson & Morgan seed packets and old copies of Exchange & Mart. But in the end we decided that we couldn't keep running away.' They found an isolated house in Tenbury Wells and hoped they'd be forgotten. However, when someone reported them to the authorities, Iris sent for help - she instructed a lawyer and bought a flock of geese. 'Local Education Authority inspectors don't tend to like geese,' she says drily. When she left the children on their own one day to get petrol, she told her sons that if the authorities arrived they should 'use their air rifles and aim at their feet'.

She believes she was ahead of her time: 'Home-educated people are different. They are not out to impress. I didn't think school was right for me when I was growing up and I didn't think it was right for my children. There's an air of failure that pervades school, but it should be about learning how to solve problems.' A founder member of Education Otherwise, which gives advice to home-educating parents, she now liaises with her former adversaries, Worcestershire Education Authority. 'We have to work together,' she says. Her children have all formed careers and she says they've thanked her for their upbringing. However, none has chosen to educate their own family at home.

When Yehudi Menuhin arrived home from school one day, his mother asked him what he'd learned. Later in life, when he'd become a celebrated violinist, he recalled: 'I didn't really learn anything.

I sat at the back of the class and there was a little window through which I could see branches.

I hoped a bird would alight. No bird alighted, but I kept hoping, and that is all I could report.' His mother's response was to take him out of school.

But is being educated at home any better, any more effective? The home-educated children I meet seem happy. They are articulate, self-assured, independent. But can they calculate fractions? Explain the significance of the Industrial Revolution? Analyse the difference between a simile and a metaphor? Or is my obsession with these scraps of information - facts that I learned in a classroom but have mostly never thought about again - a symptom of my own traditional and mostly uninspiring comprehensive education during the Seventies and Eighties?

Many professional teaching groups have reservations. Deborah Simpson, from the Professional Association of Teachers, says: 'Some children are taught at home very effectively. Others are allegedly being taught, but not much happens beyond the basics. If a parent has an ideological argument against teaching their child to read, for instance, we would argue that they're denying them a basic human right. Some home-educated children follow a curriculum. But many don't. The child chooses what they want to learn and parents don't have a clear objective.' A motion at their conference last year suggested more monitoring was needed 'as a matter of urgency'.

Clearly, there are some children who are poorly educated at home, just as there are some who receive shoddy teaching at school. Research by Paula Rothermel at Durham University suggests that the majority of home-educated children are ahead of their peers at school. Critics might argue that only responsible parents would fill in Rothermel's questionnaire (419 families responded), but nevertheless, results indicated that 80 per cent of the home-educated children she studied were at the same literacy level as the top 16 per cent in the same age range at school.

For Dr Alan Thomas, a developmental psychologist and visiting fellow at the Institute of Education, the idea that it's children who decide what to study opens up a radical way of looking at learning. However, most home-educating families begin by imitating school (one parent told me how her daughter insisted on making hall passes for her sisters). The drift into a more relaxed approach happens gradually as they gain confidence. He believes that children learn from experience in an extension of the way they did in infancy. 'They don't want neat 40-minute blocks. If you are enjoying French, what's the point of stopping at the end of the lesson? They might want to learn one subject for days, weeks.'

In his experience of studying home-educated children in Britain and Australia, Thomas has concluded that there is too much panic around literacy. 'Some children don't learn to read until they are eight or nine, with no apparent disadvantage. If you leave it until they are ready it seems they catch up. Within six months they are likely to be at least at the same level as schoolchildren the same age.' Many go on to be avid readers. 'Learning is in our culture,' says Thomas, who believes that children often learn without even realising it. 'Just as very young children learn to talk, so they will learn basic maths or how to read and write. It's as though it happens by osmosis.'

Lisa Guy picks me up in the school bus, or rather, a much loved seven-seater Mercedes which has been known to run on recycled chip fat. In the back of the car are Ursula, eight, Arthur, seven, and Leo, four. They live near Penzance on a 30-acre farm with two dogs, Slipper and Socks, 12 cows and a pony, Pixie. Lisa runs the farm while her husband Piers works for a renewable-energy company that develops wind turbines.

Arthur spends the morning playing a CD-Rom about the Ancient Egyptians and mucking about outside. Ursula reads me a story she's written about children who worked in arsenic mines in the 19th century, inspired by a trip to a nearby museum. Leo tears around on his scooter. Like Dr Alan Thomas, Lisa believes they are constantly learning, whether it's facts about biology picked up from the birth of a calf, botany from planting seeds in the polytunnel, or maths from selling daffodils at the end of the track.

Lisa started to think about home education during Ursula's first year at the local primary school, the same school her father had gone to. 'She would come home really flat. She had been bubbly, girly, vivacious. But gradually she stopped talking much. I kept asking myself - where has all her fun gone?'

They found a new school and there was an improvement, but it wasn't long before Ursula felt frustrated again. When she was diagnosed with dyslexia and discovered she'd need extra homework, her mother was more alarmed. 'She was stressed out and she was only five-and-a-half!'

So, one day, Lisa decided that they'd bunk off. They spent the day looking around a nearby castle instead: 'For the first time in weeks, Ursula was excited by something again.' As a mother, did she feel like she was behaving badly? 'No, I felt liberated more than anything. Empowered. I knew I was a responsible adult, with responsibilities towards my children. I also knew that I didn't want to put them back in that alien system. They were in danger of become institutionalised.'

She talked to Piers about home education. 'At first he was nervous,' she says. But after much discussion they decided to try it out. 'Ursula has never looked back,' says Lisa. 'None of us have. We're much more relaxed, self-assured. Piers says it's a joy to come home because we're all so happy.'

'What would you do if your mum said you had to go to school again?' I ask Ursula. She gives me an intense Paddington stare. 'If my mum told me to, I'd go,' she says. There's a pause. 'But then I'd escape.'

Over and above standards of learning, the most common criticism of home education is that children do not discover how to socialise. Jan Miles of the National Association of Head Teachers says: 'They may get educated, but they are missing out on their peers and social development. That is very much to their detriment. If they're going to survive in the world, they need to learn to interact.'

Rubin Berry, 13, disagrees. His mother Clare remembers a boy who hated school, barely spoke, was disorganised and constantly getting lost. School was the loneliest place he could be. Because his literacy skills were poor, it was suggested that he go on the special needs register. 'That seems laughable now,' says Clare, who used to be a teacher.

She and her husband Geoff, a tax accountant, decided to home educate when the family moved from Dorset to Hertfordshire two years ago and none of the local schools had places. They make unusual rebels. The house has an air of quiet study, the dining room is lined with obscure equations. However, while in the morning Rubin works, in the afternoon he has free time. With Hannah, his 16-year-old sister, he has set up a children's theatre group. He clearly loves it.

According to Clare, Rubin has 'completely changed'. He is more communicative, happier, keen to study. 'I really believe that the best way to learn is in a safe environment where they can learn in their own way. They can't do that at school. People ask me if they're lonely, but I can see them wincing as they say it. They know my children and how sociable they are.' Hannah, 16, has passed three A levels two years early. She has a place to study law at university in two years' time. Rubin is taking two A levels this summer.

The one problem Clare has encountered is finding ways that the children could take their exams. She had to search for exam boards that would accept home-educated children, and then find schools that taught the appropriate board and would agree to the Berrys sitting the papers. 'When I rang up the Local Education Authority for advice they said, "We have no idea. Tell us when you find out."'

Dr Alan Thomas has followed up home-educated students into adulthood and says they're as varied a set of people as ex-school pupils. 'Most have gone to university. Some have done exceptionally well. Some decide not to go on to further education. One is on probation for robbery. You get a whole mix.' Clearly, not all home-educating parents are acting in the best interests of the child.

I heard of one adult who would have liked to become a scientist, but his father simply wanted an extra pair of hands on the farm. Some parents might be more interested in withdrawing their child from a society they don't approve of than providing an education. But on the whole, this doesn't seem to be the case. In fact, the people who lose out are often parents who find it impossible to get back into the job market once their children have left home.

The boom in home educating forces all of us to question what we want from schools. Are league tables the answer? Why aren't vocational qualifications valued as much as academic ones? Can teachers provide both a piece of paper which proves a breadth of knowledge and a chance for children to find out who they really are? Alison Clawley is a 29-year-old with three jobs. She's an artist, she runs craft workshops for Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery and gives careers advice to teenagers. She was home educated in Birmingham before taking GCSEs at college when she was 17, going on to do an art foundation course and a BA in fine art.

How would she describe her education now? 'Perfect,' she says. 'I could follow the subjects I wanted and discard the ones I wasn't interested in. If I was really interested in something I'd study it for weeks, beyond levels children usually get to.'

She was worried about college but it turned out to be easier than she thought. 'Because I was so used to directing my own learning, it wasn't a problem. I was the one helping the students with essays, explaining how to revise.' After she graduated, there was a period when she didn't include the fact that she was home educated on her CV for fear of what employers might think. Now she finds that people are fascinated by the idea. 'They always ask the same things: Is it legal? Was your mum a teacher? And then they say how lucky I was.'

Home work

If you decide to take your child out of school you need to request a meeting with the head teacher, who is legally obliged to inform the Local Education Authority. If your child has never been to school there is no obligation to tell anyone.

There is no legal requirement to follow the National Curriculum.

Home-educating families are not entitled to any extra financial benefits. However, some museums will waive an entrance charge if the family explains that they are home educating.

It's possible to take GCSEs and A levels as a private candidate, although you must find an exam board that will take home-educated children and a school which studies that board. There is a fee for every paper.

Although Britain is not at the same stage as America, where institutions like Harvard reserve places for home-educated children, universities are increasingly open to students who have been taught at home. An alternative is an. Open University degree. The OU's foundation course is also accepted by universities as an alternative to A levels.

Looking for role models?

Agatha Christie, Richard Gere, George Bernard Shaw, Mel Gibson, Patrick Moore, Venus and Serena Williams were all home educated