More and more parents in England are opting their kids out of the education system. I could never do it, but ‘wellbeing days’ do sound nice
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.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
