School's Out Forever

2 February  2005, The Guardian
All rights reserved © 2005 Kate Ashley
(Reproduced here by kind permission)

Studying what and when you want, flexible hours, no textbooks... Up to 170,000 British children are now educated at home, and for many it's a highly informal affair. By Kate Ashley

In the orchard of their home in a village near Penrith in Cumbria, eight-year-old Bethany and seven-year-old Eliza are having a great time jumping around on some enormous straw bales. Later, they might ride their bikes or climb on the henhouse roof. This activity is not just confined to weekends - the girls can play any time they like because they don't go to school. Instead, they are educated at home by their parents, Paul and Veronika Robinson. But they don't have lessons, have never used a timetable and learn only what and when they want to learn.

"I want my kids to have freedom in their childhood, not spend it in an institution," says 37-year-old Veronika, who edits and publishes an alternative-parenting magazine called the Mother. "School is all about control and following the rules. Why should they have to ask permission to go to the loo, or study history at a certain time every week? It's not natural. If they went to school, I know I'd be there every day complaining about something."

Veronika and her 56-year-old husband Paul, who works as a singer, entertainer and voice-over artist, are equal partners in the girls' upbringing, and they are both strangers to the frenetic daily rush to get dressed and out of the door that characterises most households with school-aged children.

"We get up at our leisure - usually around 8.30-ish," says Veronika. "We might visit a friend, or go to the library, and on Tuesdays we shop at the market. In summer, we spend most of our time outside and the girls entertain themselves a lot. They're in tune with the seasons and they've got the whole of nature as their playground, not just a piece of Tarmac in the schoolyard."

This could all come as a bit of surprise if, like most people, your image of home education is the family gathered around the kitchen table studying for six hours a day - quite literally, school at home. But new research due to be published this spring reveals a very different picture of Britain's home educators.

"Out of 297 families who took part [in my research], 184 said that they never use a timetable," says Mike Fortune-Wood of Home Education UK, an independent online advice and information service for parents and professionals. "Ninety per cent never or rarely use curricular textbooks, and nearly all said that happiness, contentment and self-fulfilment were more important than academic achievement."

It's impossible to find out exactly how many British children are home-educated: there's no obligation for a child to be on any kind of register if he or she has never been to school, or has moved areas after leaving a school. But according to some estimates, there could be as many as 170,000 children being educated at home, and organisations such as Education Otherwise report rising numbers of both inquiries and members.

This lack of concrete information makes research into the subject rather tricky. There is no knowing how representative Fortune-Wood's 297 families are - as he is the first to acknowledge: "If people don't want to be found, they won't be!" But he believes his work provides "a fair and comprehensive snapshot of home education today".

"My research was advertised heavily online, with related organisations, in educational journals and at home-educating events, and the respondents included people from a huge spectrum of jobs and incomes - everything from airline pilots, doctors and lawyers to families living a totally alternative lifestyle."

Home educators give themselves a variety of names. Veronika Robinson calls herself a "radical unschooler" - a term often used in America, where home education is also on the rise. In Britain, this style of child-led teaching, where the parent acts as a facilitator, is more commonly referred to as autonomous education or informal learning, and different families put it into practice to vastly different degrees. Most of the time, Robinson leaves it up to her children to choose what to do each day and there's none of the after-school shunting from swimming lessons to gymnastics to French club that forms part of the routine for many children today.

"We don't do much in the way of organised activity," she says. "We meet up with other families to share toys and we've joined a weekly knitting circle in a local cafe. It's mostly elderly women who love us coming, and the girls now knit endless scarves and coats for our long-suffering cat! Bethany did try ballet a few years ago, but we felt it was like a factory farm, with no room for creative expression. So we stopped that and they haven't asked to do anything else."

So far, so good. But what, you might ask, are the children actually learning?

"It wasn't important to me that the girls could read by a certain age, but they both picked it up for themselves at around seven," says Robinson.

"Weighing cooking ingredients uses maths, and making a shopping list teaches them to write. We adopted five hens that turned out to be cockerels and observing them has taught the girls about survival of the fittest and pecking orders. So much of school is totally irrelevant - I believe that children can learn far more from everyday life and the world around them."

Fortune-Wood's research supports this. Three-quarters of the parents who responded to his survey thought that literacy and numeracy ages were irrelevant in the home education context. And only 15% felt that planning what to learn was crucial.

Not all professionals, however, agree. "We are not in any way against home education," says Deborah Simpson of the Professional Association of Teachers (Pat). "But we do have concerns. For example, if a parent is ideologically opposed to teaching a child to read and he doesn't learn until he's 10, then we would say that he's been denied access to a wealth of experience that, in normal circumstances, would have been open to him for several years. And I would be worried about parents who didn't have clear objectives about what they want to achieve."

But Alan Thomas, of the Institute of Education, disagrees. "Different approaches work in different settings," he says. "What is right for school, where you have 30 children in a class, doesn't necessarily transfer to home, where you have one-to-one parental interaction. There are home educators, particularly those doing it for religious reasons, who replicate the classroom, but you don't need to 'do school' to educate your child. In my experience, the vast majority of home educators are not cranks or crackpots, but perfectly ordinary people who have understandable concerns about the limitations of school."

For many families, the move to a more informal pattern of learning is a gradual process. This was the case for Leslie Safran, who runs the Otherwise Club for home-educated children in north London and taught her son and daughter at home. "I went out and bought text books, drew up timetables, the works. Then I'd find that they weren't in the mood for English one day, or we'd be distracted into doing something else, like digging up worms in the garden to find out more about them," she says. "And if they're really interested in a particular subject, you can carry on all day - you don't have to stop when the bell rings. The beauty of home education is that you feel that you're living your life - you're not just on a treadmill."

But what about when the children grow up? Can they go to university, forge a career? The home educators' answer is they can if they want to. There are a variety of routes into higher education, but probably the most common is to join a local college. This is what Gus Harris-Reid has done. "I was educated at home all my life. I'd never had a lesson or been inside a classroom until I started GCSEs," says the 18-year-old. "I'm now studying for 4 A-levels at Exeter College. I've had no problem with the work or with fitting in, and I think I get more out of it because I've made an active choice to be there." When asked to reflect on his experience of home education, his considered response is, "Like a permanent holiday, really!" Not a bad start for someone who plans to take a mechanical engineering degree next year.

But despite stories like his, there are calls for tighter regulation. "At Pat, we think there should be more monitoring of home educators so that children don't slip through the net," says Simpson. "Inspections by the local education authority should be compulsory, and parents should have to present the child and his or her work."

Home educators might respond that escape from rules, regulations and tests is precisely why they took it up in the first place, and that there are plenty of children who have been failed by the school system. And though many families welcome visits from the authorities, others believe that as long as they are operating within the law, they should be left alone.

Meanwhile, despite the increase in numbers, home educators remain a small minority. While it does have many attractions - you can kiss goodbye to the tyranny of league tables, catchment areas and admissions policies, not to mention taking holidays when you please - there are also downsides. Many home-educating families have lower than average income, in part because it's difficult for both parents to work. And the mere thought of spending 24 hours a day with the kids would be enough to put many people off.

Robinson, however, has no doubt that she's chosen the right path.

"It can be tiring sometimes, especially when the children are constantly asking questions all day. But it shows me that they're learning to think for themselves and developing their own way of looking at the world. I want them to have the confidence to follow their dreams and to be recognised for who they are and not what they do, and I don't think school would give them that."

Lessons in life: the lowdown on home education
· It is a parent's legal right to educate their children at home. You don't need to be a teacher or have any special qualifications.
· If your child has never been on a school roll, you don't need to inform anyone that you are doing this. If a child is in a state school, parents must write to say they're taking him or her out of the system.
· There is no obligation to follow the national curriculum or teach specific subjects.
· People who home educate say that they do so for three main reasons: bullying or general dissatisfaction with the school system; philosophical or ideological concerns; religious or cultural reasons.