In the Forest Row area of East Sussex, 30 families have opted out of formal education. Every Monday, parents and children get together to socialise. The noise is appalling. Girls charge in and out, someone is playing an electric guitar and two boys thwack billiard balls round a table. The girls swiftly dispense with the old chestnut that home-educated children have no friends. Isabella, 12, tells me she hated school. “I never felt clever enough. It made me feel small and undermined. Here we’re all good at something.” Anna Durdant-Hollamby, 16, and her sister, Sophie, 13, have been learning at home for seven years. “All my friends who have been taking GCSEs at school have been ill and stressed,” says Anna. “They’re smoking, they’re drinking, one has glandular fever. There’s academic pressure, there’s peer pressure. They’re a complete mess.”
Last year, Anna gained a B for her GCSE in English. But it’s not an experience she wants to repeat, she says, because the course was so narrow. She is now studying journalism online. “So many people take exams out of fear, because they feel their life will be a failure if they don’t take them,” she says. Nothing would induce Anna back to school, but Sophie gets “bored and self-critical” and asks: “Is my life rubbish?” “Potentially we could be making a ghastly mistake,” admits her mother, Winnie. “But we’re trying to teach them responsibility for their own happiness.”
Joanne McNaughton home-educates her five children as well as running a smallholding in Crowborough, East Sussex; she describes her family as “the nearest thing to the Waltons”. She admits it’s tough, both emotionally and financially, but has no regrets: “Whether you’re living in a council flat or on a 200-acre farm of organic wheat, you can make it work for your children and yourself and that’s the power of it. I’m pro-choice. One system doesn’t fit all.” Her eldest, Barnes, 12, started at the local village school at five. “The teaching was fragmented into 15-minute or half-hour slots for reading, writing and number work, and I couldn’t see how children could learn like that.
A child doesn’t want to learn about numbers because it’s 2pm on Thursday, when he might still be thinking about an earthworm he saw at lunchtime. The curriculum doesn’t allow time for his interests to be explored. Dedicated teachers’ jobs have been made impossible.”
Haig McNaughton, 7, is fascinated by Egyptology; his brother, Forbes, 9, by poultry. Barnes is doing a project on Admiral Nelson; Hamilton, 11, on the trees in Ashdown Forest. They don’t have a computer but they go to the library and source information there. All the Forest Row parents are passionate about the importance of family life. “Education isn’t just about absorbing facts,” says Joanne. “My children are learning to be happy people. Nothing gets to crisis point now, because we’ve all got time to talk and to express our feelings.”
Paula Rothermel, who lectures at Durham University’s School of Education, spent five years studying 419 home-educated families and found that they significantly outperformed their school-going peers throughout primary school, both in terms of academic potential and social skills. She found 64% of home-educated five-year-olds scored over 75% on their Pips (performance indicators in primary schools) baseline assessments, as opposed to 5.1% of primary-school children nationally. Surprisingly, Rothermel found that few parents were home-educating in order to hothouse their children towards glittering GCSE results. Only 14% of families followed the national curriculum; 58% didn’t use it at all. Older children tended to bypass GCSEs, moving straight on to A-levels at 16.
The decision to home-educate does not mean your child is for ever barred from the school system. Judith Jamieson’s daughter, Camilla, now 18, went to school from the age of five to nine. She then learnt at home for five years and went back at 16. She has just taken the international baccalaureate and has offers from three universities to study veterinary medicine. Her brother, Alex, has never been to school, and didn’t pick up a book till he was eight. Six months later he’d read The Hobbit from beginning to end, and he now has his sights set on Cambridge.
“Children will remember what they find interesting and ditch the rest,” says their mother. “When Camilla was nine, she came home from school saying she was terrible at maths. What she meant was that she didn’t have a good ability to memorise numbers. For a year we did Mensa maths games for kids, and she’s now gained higher maths at international baccalaureate. Her friend, who knew her tables by the time she was seven, dropped the subject.”
Most parents who home-educate are willing to sacrifice both time and money to give their children what they consider to be the best start in life. Mike Fortune Wood’s study suggests that home educators, far from the well-off bohemian stereotype, are actually poorer than most parents, with an average income of £23,000. “We have all given up something,” says Tatyana Sheffield, mother of Isabella, 12, Finian, 10, and Bridghid, 8. “Because you need time to home-educate, we live on one income and we are straitened by that.” Tatyana, who is highly educated herself (public school; Trinity College, Dublin), admits that her husband isn’t supportive of what she is doing. “He envisages me having coffee with friends while the children play. He can’t stand the chaos. He thinks that they are not being properly educated and that they’ll lack the equipment to cope with adult life. He only agreed to let me try because we didn’t have enough money to send them to boarding school.”
The children’s time at a London prep school cemented Tatyana’s resolve. It demonstrated what she calls “the foie-gras factory of education”, where children are stuffed with facts without regard for either different rates of learning or personal interests. “My son turned from a sunny little boy into someone who was miserable and surly. Parents complained that their five-year-olds weren’t getting enough homework, but if you look at the research, the children who start to learn later tend not to switch off when they’re teenagers. We’re brainwashed into thinking that the earlier you do everything the better.”
Tatyana began with formal sessions round the kitchen table, but it didn’t work. “My son wept every time we opened a book. They seem to absorb everything by osmosis. My whole family thinks I’m barking, but every day that passes, I become more convinced that I am doing the right thing. Fin says he misses school, ‘kind of…’ but he gets to see his friends anyway.”
Where parents get a bee in their bonnet about home education, little children inevitably follow. It’s debatable how much choice they have. They don’t know if they want to go to school because most of them have never been. Chances are, they’d love it. What they seem to lack is belonging to a child world of their own, one not inhabited by their ever-present parents. But even so, it’s difficult to find fault. Home education is now so widespread that children have formed their own social networks with other home eds. If they’re considered freaks and weirdos by the school-going population, they can live with it.
