“I’m so stupid, I can’t do anything, I don’t know anything, and I’m always last in the class.” These were the words of my six-year-old granddaughter, inconsolable one bedtime.
The crisis had been building for some time. As so often happens when children are going through what is assumed to be a temporary “bad patch” at school, we had spoken to the school about her unhappiness, received some reassuring words and hoped that it was a phase she would get through.
But enough was enough. My daughter decided at that instant that Lauris was not returning to school. “I’m never going to knowingly submit my child to a situation where – at six years old – she is already seeing herself as a failure.”
This was the point that our family started down the arduous path of home education, with plenty of misgivings. We quickly realised that Lauris was dyslexic – something the school had not picked up – and that she had hearing problems, later resolved by an operation on her tonsils and adenoids. Both difficulties might have been spotted by her teachers, but with a class of more than thirty children, and recent cuts to the number of teaching assistants, it was perhaps unsurprising that they were missed.
So many positives
The transformation in Lauris was extraordinary. From an angry and difficult little girl who hated reading, she became a happy, active and engaged child – still quirky, but now confident and curious. Family members, including myself, who had initially been dubious about home education were rapidly convinced.
We began building our own programme, teaching subjects we knew something about, had expertise in, or were prepared to learn ourselves. One family member taught knitting and handicrafts; another taught French and history; and a lover of nature introduced Lauris to foraging and the environment. My daughter took on the core subjects of maths and English and worked to a clear daily timetable: lessons in the morning, followed by play or meeting friends in the afternoons.
Friends had been a particular concern of mine. Surely, once she was out of school, Lauris would become isolated and lose her circle of friends? To our relief, the opposite proved to be the case. We discovered a thriving home-education community in Sussex, with numerous outdoor and indoor activities and a wide choice of alternative learning spaces for young children.
The latest local figures provide an explanation for the scale of that provision. In West Sussex, around 2,000 children were registered as being home educated in 2025, an increase of 28% on the previous year. East Sussex recorded more than 2,500 children in elective home education during the 2023/24 academic year. These figures reflect the national picture, where the number of children known to be receiving elective home education has risen dramatically in recent years.
Tailoring the lessons
So what is driving this trend? As our family discovered, it is not an easy decision to home educate. Following the national curriculum can place significant demands on parents and other family members involved in day-to-day teaching. Online tuition, equipment and local activities can also be expensive. The financial and time commitment involved rules out the choice of home education for many families.
Yet the numbers continue to rise. One important attraction is the flexibility that home education offers, allowing the time and opportunity to follow an individual child’s interests without judging whether a particular subject is “better or worse” than another.
When Lauris was learning about the Victorians, for instance, she became fascinated by some of the exaggerated fashions of the period. She decided to sew versions of dresses she found in 19th century portraits for herself and her sister, using hula hoops as the framework for crinoline skirts, to great effect. With the best will in the world, a teacher responsible for more than thirty children in a class would not have been able to tailor a lesson in this way to one child’s particular interest.
Small children, like all young animals, need space, fresh air and active play to burn off energy but, with the disposal of school playing fields over past years, that opportunity has become increasingly limited. Many spend their day in classrooms or in front of screens, while outdoor play and physical activity are restricted to small tarmac playgrounds. For some young children, being expected to sit at a desk for the majority of the school day is tantamount to torture, and this is often when behavioural problems begin, and a child is labelled as “disruptive and difficult”. In contrast, many learning spaces for home educated children are based in an outside environment – forest schools, farm activity days, athletics programmes – which allow very active kids to let off steam and enjoy the learning involved.
Increasing numbers of dissatisfied parents
None of this means that it’s the right answer for every child. Conventional schools can provide access to specialist teachers, structured learning and a breathing space for families at home that they really value. In contrast, home education can be demanding and expensive. But the rapid growth in the number of families choosing to teach their children at home suggests that an increasing number feel that the conventional school system is not meeting their children’s needs.
Over the past decade, several developments have placed additional pressures on schools: the changes to the national curriculum introduced under Michael Gove in 2013 that place more emphasis on narrow academic achievement; successive Conservative governments’ austerity drive; and the disruption caused by Covid. Operating within limited resources, many schools no longer have the capacity to cater for children whose abilities, interests or development do not fit neatly into a standard model.
Lauris’s story is only one family’s experience. But it illustrates a question that policymakers should take seriously: why are increasing numbers of parents coming to the conclusion that their children will flourish outside the school gates?
Unless the education system is able to adjust to future demands and become more imaginative, flexible and responsive to individual children, their talents and interests, I suspect that the number of families choosing a different path may well continue to rise.
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