An Honest Reflection of Home Education

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An honest reflection and evaluation of home education.

And why it should be considered carefully.

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. 

Soren Kierkegaard

Long before our son was born, my husband and I knew that we would choose to home educate. Our decision was shaped by many influences, resulting in a well-informed choice in which we had complete confidence. It was, nevertheless, a decision we made which did not involve our son, at least in his formative years. This is something upon which we now reflect.

The background to our decision to home educate initially stemmed from our own ghastly experiences of the school system. Neither my husband nor I can recall a single, positive day from the fourteen years we spent in education. There was the incessant bullying; the Lord of the Flies playground experiences; the insipid, uninspiring teachers and the disregard of students who were academically “middling” – those who were very able, coped admirably; those who were struggling were given extra help and those of us who could have joined the very able, with just a little bit more help, were ignored. And there was never any scope to ask questions. We were expected to accept what our teachers said and, even though we both went to “good” state schools, critical thinking was discouraged. It had, for us, been a miserable existence and one which we didn’t want to inflict on our son.

Soon after we met, my husband introduced me to friends whose parents had made the somewhat radical and progressive decision – especially for the 1980s – to home educate. This was the moment when I realised the potential of a life for children without school; it changed everything for me. Simply knowing that there was an alternative path, allowed us to plan our future differently.

My experience as a teacher also influenced our decision. It might seem surprising that someone with such a negative school experience would want to become a teacher – let alone qualify as one – but I taught in further and higher education which is a world away from primary and secondary schooling. Students, on the whole, are more engaged; they actively participate in the learning experience, and teaching is no longer about “crowd control”. I recognised that, if our child didn’t go to school, he could have this style of learning from the outset, something which I knew would stand him in good stead for future years. He would have the freedom to question what he was being taught; learn to present his views with clarity and authority and he could have some agency over the subjects and specifications he studied.

Coming as we did from stereotypical middle-class families, both my husband and I valued education and, while a cliché, it’s transformative power. We had both been to university and we were academically inclined by nature. We wanted our son to have the primary and secondary education which we had longed for but had not received. I knew that I would deliver an education based on the classical model, with a Socratic method of teaching and that it would be structured. The desire was for our son to have an expansive education which, age eighteen, would give him life choices. I think it would be disingenuous to say that we had not anticipated university would be the ultimate goal but, honestly, it was more that we wanted him to have options. Having worked within education, I had also become increasingly alarmed by the slipping standards in the quality of teaching being delivered. I entered teaching with both undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, as well as PGCE – and, incidentally, having also qualified and practised as a social worker – but I was working alongside colleagues, in further education, who were unqualified, and many were teaching subjects of which they had no knowledge.

It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well. 

Rene Descartes

All these factors, set our home education journey in motion and we were very conventional in our approach. We did what many parents do, and we read to our son at every conceivable opportunity.  By the age of three, we started to look at words together using the “look and say” method. I have never liked phonics, but we did have a brief foray into this world which lasted about three weeks. We changed back to “look and say” when our son asked, “what is a d-o-g? It’s a dog, isn’t it?” Reading was a big aspect of family life, and we were fortunate to have an extensive library, significantly stocked by attentive grandparents. Our son was reading fluently by the age of four and so we started to introduce him to a more diverse range of books, rather than the standard “help your child to read” ones. And by a more diverse range, I mean classics including classical poetry. There is nothing terribly exciting about reading Kipper books, but Ransome, Uttley, Defoe, Nesbit and Burnett provide children with adventure, visions and interesting worlds as well interesting words.

Writing was also something which we started early. Home education done this way is very hands on. We spent hours ‘playing’ with letters, seeing them as a tool to express wonderous things and recognising how they could build new, exciting worlds. It is wonderful when a child learns that they too can write stories and that the thoughts in their heads can be committed to paper for others to enjoy. And we did many collages and projects, something which I know our son would now say was “overdone”! But they were useful: he would hand write a classical poem and then identify the segments which interested him and illustrate it. And, since it was important to us, our son was writing cursively and confidently by the age of five.

We did adopt the mantra of reading, writing and arithmetic and these were our key areas of focus. If a child can read and write, they are empowered to find things out for themselves and will be able to access worlds which are different, exciting and which provide them with new learning. But this is not all we did. We also introduced aspects of philosophy to help train the mind to think logically but also laterally. And while we were not ardent advocates of a national curriculum style education, we did broadly follow it. Science was taught (although biology abandoned early on, since neither son or mother had any particular desire to pursue it!), as was history, geography, religion (with a critical gaze), politics and social science. I did also, for several years, introduce French but it held no interest for our son, so we gave this up as a lost cause! However, Latin – and a brief journey into Mandarin – did follow later.

Home education for us did, more or less, replicate school. We were fortunate to have a separate building for education, so that “home life” could be kept separate. Of course, learning was still integrated into everyday life, but we were able to keep my role as a teacher and my role as a parent separate. I’m not convinced, on reflection, that it worked as well as I had hoped. We started our home education day at 9:30 most mornings and finished around 1:30 in the afternoon, although with flexibility built in. The afternoons were always free and involved trips out, meet ups with other home educating families or some other extracurricular activity.

Although we were very focused on education, we had never especially pushed the academic side. However, it became clear, age ten, that this was something our son wanted, and he became interested in taking exams. We started preparing for GCSEs at age eleven although, in all reality, he was already fairly well prepared. He went on to take six GCSEs an academic year early, with the four remaining being taken during the pandemic, for which he was awarded predicted grades (based on two, invigilated, mock exams in each subject and a portfolio of evidence), and secured grades 8 and 9 throughout. Two years later, and still being home educated, he took his A Levels, securing grade A in all three subjects and receiving five Russell Group university offers. At the end of our eighteen-year journey, he is now happily installed in his chosen university and is going from strength to strength and from success to success.

What if we had the chance to do it again and again, until we finally did it right? 

Wouldn’t that be wonderful!  

Kate Atkinson

There is no blueprint for what makes a good parent. When you bring a child into the world, you do so on the basis that you want to give them the best possible life. It’s a monumental responsibility, which forces us to take decisions on an almost continual basis. Clearly, we will all make some decisions which are better than others and we will get many things wrong along the way. So, was home education successful?  What would we change? Would we do it again? 

When we elected to home educate, one of my biggest fears was failing our son academically. It felt incumbent on me to provide the best possible education; to not just be “good enough” but to be superb. And certainly our child achieved academic success. Of course, we have no way of knowing if the outcome would have been the same had he gone to school.  I think that, in all probability, it would have been a very different outcome. He is also self-motivated, self-reliant, self-confident, resourceful and happy. Again, I am not convinced that this would have been the result, had he gone to school. However, we often wonder if we were too entrenched in our ideology that we never open to the alternative – school? I don’t know, but quite possibly so.

There were some things which I didn’t see at the time, which I see now. Since our son was never registered at school, we were under no legal obligation to inform the local authority of our decision. On reflection, I wish we had; it may have been helpful to have someone else’s perspective. While he was given the opportunity to go to school on three separate occasions – age seven, eleven and sixteen – he seemingly chose not to. It’s possible, however, that the nuanced way in which I presented the opportunity, might have influenced his answer. If so, this was a mistake on my part. Nevertheless, our son arrived at age eighteen with life choices ahead of him and with an education of the highest standard.

Socialisation is another aspect of home education which is frequently discussed, and we did find this problematic, even with extracurricular activities. We ended up staying with a small group of people, who shared a similar approach to home education. Between the ages of six months and seven years, we tried lots of home education groups – often travelling quite a distance – but we found them distinctly challenging places to be. There was no structure to these groups and no rules. They became synonymous, for us, with everything which we didn’t like about our school years. They were actually quite unnerving places to be, especially if you announced yourself as a “structured home educator”. The extracurricular activities did provide our son with opportunities which he would never have experienced at school, but it wasn’t enough. The home education community, at the time, was not as big as it is now, and there were very few structured home educators. Things might have been different, had we been starting now.

We have always lived rurally, so our son grew up with acres of land in which to play and explore, surrounded by nature and animals – horses, dogs, cats and chickens. He had what in today’s modern parlance would be considered a natural, toxic free childhood. The enormous benefits of being in nature are well documented and rightly so. However, rural living also brings with it some challenges which are not, perhaps, experienced, by urban home educators in quite the same way – a sense of isolation and of being “other”. There is a tendency, for many of us, to hunger for what we don’t have and while we made many trips into large towns and cities, we always returned to the peace of the countryside and to a feeling of separation. It is another factor which I did not wholly take into consideration when we embarked on our journey all those years ago. It has come as no surprise to me that our son has whole heartedly welcomed city living; it provides him with connections, opportunities and experiences in abundance.

There are many things which I would have changed. Despite attempting to do so, I would have tried even harder to separate my role as mother from my role as teacher. Being both to a child can create an intense relationship and which, on reflection, has the potential to be a suffocating place for a child. I increasingly recognised the importance for children to be taught by others, so that they are exposed to different perspectives and learn to navigate different relationship dynamics. Education should be a shared journey, involving a variety of adults who can nurture and inspire, along with fellow students who can support each other. And I would not have necessarily home educated from the outset. While we had no wish for our son to experience the misery of our school years, there was no guarantee that he would have done.

The ultimate question is, would we do it again? I honestly don’t know the answer to that. I always had grave concerns about the standard of education being afforded to children and that only appears to have become worse. On this basis alone, I would be reluctant to send a child to school. The rise in mental health issues being experienced by school children is another valid reason against, as is the lack of agency given to children over what they can learn. Possibly, until there is a significant overhaul of the current education system, I think that home education would still be the preferred option. It is not, however, a decision I would been quite so convinced by, as I was back in 2003. And I no longer see it through rose tinted spectacles.

Of hindsight, Sophocles wrote, “I have no desire to suffer twice, in reality and then in retrospect”.  We all make decisions, at the time, which we consider to be the right ones. The results of our home education journey do indeed reflect that. Our son secured himself a place at a leading Russell Group university and is thriving there. He has embraced university life wholeheartedly – groups, activities, opportunities – achieving amazing things academically and politically. His oral and written skill are second to none and he is able to navigate any situation in which he finds himself.

There is a “but” though. While we always felt that we were well equipped to deliver a high-quality education, and while we were always mindful of the issues there could be with socialisation, I did not consider that home education would make him “feel different”. It just never crossed my mind. As adults we can indulge the decision to become nonconformists; we can embrace our revolutionary zeal. For a child, however, learning in isolation and not being among your peer group (no matter how awful that peer group might be) leaves, as a good friend and successful home educator of two boys points out, “a lone child marooned in an adult world”. Home education represents something different; a detraction from the norm and that’s not always easy for a child.

Home education is also a risk. If you succeed, your child will have amazing choices and a wonderful future ahead of them. But it is a heavy burden of responsibility to bear alone. The parent of a child who fails in school will blame the teachers. A child who fails at home, will blame the parent. And this could easily damage any relationship.

The landscape of home education is likely to change, if the School’s Bill passes into law. There are crucial discussions which need to take place about the nature of education in the UK, whether that is delivered through the school system or through home education. Interesting times lie ahead.

By Alison Nicole Blair-Bullett, former social worker and teacher in post compulsory education. Now a social science tutor, academic mentor and home education consultant.