I never thought I'd say this, but I now understand the appeal of home schooling | Emma Brockes

6 days ago 11

If you want to get rich, a friend of mine said recently, set up an exam centre. We were talking about her decision to home school – or unschool, or home educate, depending on your tribal affiliation – her two children, making her simultaneously part of a broader trend and also somewhat strange to herself. The cliche of home schooling still leans on the idea of a fringe choice made by fanatical parents who produce a poorly socialised child – if you said of a child: “They’re home schooled”, you’d trigger a knowing look that implied: “Say no more.”

Well – maybe – all that is changing. Home schooling is still fringe, but the numbers are soaring. In 2024, UK councils received 66,000 notifications of children moving to education at home, more than double the number from 2020 and bringing up the total to some 111,700 children in England. Given that there are roughly 9 million school-age children in England alone, this still represents a tiny proportion. But the leap – which is subject to large regional swings: the number of home-schooled kids has more than tripled in the north-east and has risen by 85% in the east of England – is significant, not least because it seems to encompass families that in a million years would not have imagined themselves taking this path.

I spoke to two parents, one in London, one in Yorkshire, both of whom moved their kids to home schooling after or towards the end of primary school, both of whom are loving it, albeit sheepishly, and neither of whom believes it is prohibitively difficult. Both are atypical to some extent, since neither was acting for religious or health reasons, or in response to failures in the threadbare special educational needs and disabilities (Send) provision in state schools, traditionally the primary motivators for pulling kids out of mainstream school. To both I wanted to ask: how can you stand it? The staying across the curriculum, the never getting time off and – chiefly – the teaching of maths, which presumably entails you having to do some maths?

Tyan Jones, in London, has a son turning 14 who would be in year 9 and a 10-year-old girl who would be finishing up primary school. Instead they are both at home, where Jones oversees their learning. Her eldest son left school after year 6 when he didn’t get into a single one of his requested high schools in a London borough where the choices aren’t great. Her daughter left year 3 a few years later after her son’s departure seemed to work out. She is a single parent who runs her own business and can be flexible around when she works. This is the main thing about home schooling, she says: it permits a form of “concentrated learning” that allows you to determine your own schedule – in the case of her family, doing 9am to 2.30pm “school” days Monday through Wednesday, then taking a four-day weekend during which Jones “works like crazy” at her actual job while the kids do clubs and extracurriculars and all the stuff that keeps them up with their friends.

It’s the friends thing that parents of kids in school tend to round on as the starkest perceived downside to home learning. How does a kid learn to negotiate with difficult people, or weather conflict, when they’re in a class size of one? The parents I spoke to said removing their kids from school didn’t entail dropping their friendships, and that with the right out-of-school activities – Jones’s son goes to orchestra on a Saturday and she is, shrewdly, careful to organise meet-ups for him in which he is thrown in with kids he doesn’t particularly like – the same socialisation can occur as within school walls.

I mean, to me it sounds like hell. But talking to Jones – who says that if her daughter feels like having a “reading day” or “a complete day of cello”, then she goes ahead and permits it – I can see the appeal. Not everyone does. So strong are the feelings triggered by people making choices for their kids that you might not make for your own that my friend in Yorkshire a) asks to remain anonymous and b) says she has actually lost friends by deciding to home school her kids. “It’s weird how hostile people are,” she says – and this is before you get to the hostility between factions within the home-schooling world, some of which reject the term “home schooling” because it centres the word “school”. (“We’re not into that crowd,” she says drily.)

They are atypical in other ways too: her 15-year-old daughter and 19-year-old son are so highly motivated that her son, earlier on in his teens, bought all the textbooks himself, got up before 5am each day to study, knocked 10 GCSEs out of the park a year early and has now returned to sixth form, where he is on course for top grades for all his A-levels (he took some time out before sixth form to be sure that going back to school was what he wanted to do). “He was a boy who loved ballet and the Brontës and hated football – he didn’t fit in at secondary school,” says my friend, who is an artist married to a teacher. Her daughter, meanwhile, was “quiet at school” but has flourished at home, and combines ploughing through the curriculum with a day of dance and youth theatre a week. “I’m upstairs painting,” says my friend while her kids effectively self-educate between textbooks, YouTube videos and the occasional maths tutor.

I couldn’t do it. I think I know this about myself. During the pandemic, when I was up against a deadline to finish writing a book, my five-year-olds spent six weeks almost exclusively on TikTok and did none of the school worksheets. If you’re a corporate lawyer or someone who works shifts in retail, it’s not doable without outside help either. But if you can pull it off, says Jones, “it’s less stressful than school. My favourite day is Thursday, a ‘wellbeing day’, when we clean the house, the kids do all the cooking, and we chat and chill.” When my friend in Yorkshire first pulled her kids out of school, she was full of guilt and panic. “Oh my gosh, what am I doing?” But here’s what she discovered: that if your kids “don’t fit the mould”, there is another option, and it’s not as hard as you think.

“There’s more time to be alive,” she says of the way they have figured things out – and that includes the one thing parents with kids in school dream of: taking holidays in term time at a fraction of the cost.