he home-schooling movement emerged in the 1970s, when it was considered a fringe pursuit. Today, it is probably the fastest-growing form of education in the UK. The number of home-schooled children has risen by about 40% over three years, according to recent research by the BBC. Around 48,000 children were being home-educated across the UK in 2016-2017, up from about 34,000 in 2014-15. But the real number is likely to be higher. Data is not collected centrally, and while local authorities keep a register of home-educated children, this only covers children who have been withdrawn from school. Children who are never put into school are currently not required to register.
Many parents who opt to home-school their children say they are avoiding bullying, exam pressure and stress. Others have concerns about special educational needs, not getting a place at the school of their choice, or the school environment. “It used to be a philosophical ethos; now it’s about children having some sort of difficulty at school,” says Edwina Theunissen, former trustee of Education Otherwise, a home-education charity founded in 1977.
Helen Lees, visiting research fellow at York St John University, and a specialist in alternative education, believes the increase suggests “something quite worrying about the state of the education system. I’m not sure having 30 children in a classroom all doing the same thing works any more. Not with the way the classroom is structured, and the way the curriculum is followed.”
Changes in technology have made it easier to teach out of the classroom, and methods range from the traditional approach of textbooks, study schedules, grades and tests to “unschooling” or “autonomous education”, a philosophy conceived by the US author and educator John Holt in the 1970s. He believed that if you give a child the freedom to follow their own interests, and a rich assortment of resources, they will do the actual learning themselves.