Historically, home-schooling has been seen as a niche or eccentric choice of education: an option only really considered by hippies, conspiracy theorists, religious fanatics or socially awkward geniuses. Its reputation has not been a positive one: critics argue that home-schooled children are at risk of abuse and radicalisation; that it is a form of social imprisonment, keeping students away from their peers; and that it is more about pleasing over-protective, paranoid parents than doing what is best for the child.
Banning home-schooling is not the answer
Not anymore. Despite the stigma, an ever-growing minority of parents are choosing to home-school their children: 175,000 students were home-schooled in 2024/5, an increase of 15 per cent from the previous year. In England, the main reasons cited by parents were the child’s mental health (14 per cent), philosophical reasons (14 per cent), lifestyle (9 per cent) and dissatisfaction with schools (13 per cent). A disproportionately high number of home-schooled pupils (one in six) also have special educational needs or disabilities, and feel frustrated or let-down by the state provision on offer.
Home-schooling is a sensitive issue because you have to balance the rights of parents to bring up their children (and teach them) how they want, with the rights of children to a decent education and to be socialised with their peers. Giving anxious students a ‘safe space’ to learn at home may also seem helpful in the short-term, but it can trap them in a cycle of avoidance. By keeping them at home, parents inadvertently reward self-limiting behaviours, and decrease their children’s tolerance for risk, adversity and new situations. The path-of-least resistance simply feeds the fear: the more students avoid school, the more they build negative associations around it, and the more the anticipation builds.
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The UK is also an international outlier in its unusually laissez-faire attitude towards home-schooling: France and Germany have effectively banned it except in very exceptional cases, citing the importance of school to social cohesion; in Portugal, any parent teaching their child needs to have a university degree; while most states in the US require parents to have an educational diploma or follow a set curriculum. Discussions around whether to increase regulation around home-schooling are inevitably politicised, rebranded as a debate between parental choice and state over-reach.
The growing numbers of families home-schooling their children though is not a victory for liberalism: this is not the consequence of parental choice but the lack of it.
If parents are unhappy with their child’s current educational provision then their options are incredibly limited: the vast majority of grammar schools have closed, and the ones that do remain are so over-subscribed that their catchment areas immediately have a premium-priced postcode. Other, non-selective comprehensive schools may not be an option either: free schools and academies have been told to cut or freeze places in the hopes that this will stop other schools from collapsing as pupil numbers fall. These schools are now also being forced to follow the national curriculum too, while others that offer alternative examination boards (such as the International Baccalaureate) are losing their funding, meaning that there is almost no autonomy when it comes to pedagogy.
Labour’s VAT policy has made private schools unaffordable for all but the very wealthiest. And our special educational needs system is over-bloated, under-resourced and fundamentally broken: some children with complex needs are being sent to schools over 200 miles away because there is no capacity for them. If parents are unhappy with their local comprehensive – whether that’s because of bullying, bad behaviour, lack of academic challenge, or any other dissatisfaction – then what options do they really have?
Home-schooling has therefore become a last resort that too many parents feel forced to take out of desperation: this is not a question of choice but compromise. Banning home-schooling is not the answer: for some students, home-learning can be truly transformative. However, the reality is that it takes an incredible amount of sacrifice from parents – more than most are prepared or able to give. Private tuition can be an option, but it is costly, and online schools often struggle with poor engagement from students who are demotivated from spending their entire day behind a screen. When home-schooling works, it really works, but too often it doesn’t – and it therefore just becomes about keeping kids off school.
The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill has proposed creating a national register for home-schooled children, and changing the law so that parents need local authority permission to withdraw their children from school. These are important measures in terms of safeguarding, but making it harder for parents to home-school will not necessarily make it any easier for them to send their children to normal school – or make their children any happier. We have to address the reasons why so many families feel traditional school no longer works for them, and do our best to persuade them otherwise.
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