Why is this increasing, and what should be done?

The number of children and young people deregistering from UK schools to begin home education has risen significantly in recent years. As Anna Chinazzi suggests, schools can learn from home educators, as education departments across the world develop more inclusive practices in line with the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. However, for some families in the UK, it seems that home education is a response to the current reality of schooling. The UK government acknowledges this in their listed reasons why families may choose to home-educate.

Reasons for beginning home education:

• Dissatisfaction with the school, or school system
• Bullying
• Children’s mental or physical health
• Children’s school attendance difficulties
• Unsupported special educational needs
• School exclusion and ‘off-rolling’
• No school place available.

My recent article reports on UK research with 99 home-educating families. Children had originally enrolled at school and been expected to remain in mainstream formal education. For example, one parent ‘assumed they would go down the same route as me and go to school and then maybe uni.’ Another believed ‘they would be supported as an individual throughout the mainstream education that we thought he was entitled to. That we could work with the school as a team to iron out any difficulties together.’ The families talked about their experiences of failed school relationships. They described meetings and exchanges with teachers and other education professionals. These overwhelmingly reflected a ‘professional’ perspective that education happens at school, and parents should defer to schools and teachers. It became clear that families had clear expectations for their children’s educational experiences even before they started school.

Broken promises?

• Parents’ expectations are informed by what families perceive as promises, based on their understanding of education policy that can be accessed online.
• Schools do not seem able to keep these promises, whether due to lack of training, funding or other resources.
• When children’s educational needs are not met, parents feel that promises are broken.
• Families feel unsupported, and relationships can break down as a result.

Repeated patterns

Families explained the negative experiences and broken relationships between schools and children or their parents that caused their move to home education. There were patterns in these experiences, sequences of events described by families, where children, young people and their parents transitioned first to school, and then towards home education. As a researcher, considering these home-school relationships in the context of current education policy and professional standards related to inclusion allowed me to create a framework to understand why and how families transitioned to home education. This is simplified as a cycle below.

Figure 1 Flowchart outlining the cycle of transition to home education.Show descriptionThe image depicts a flowchart with two main columns connected by arrows. On the left, highlighted in pink, is the “Breakdown of school placement” column, which lists factors such as family decisions to home educate, interactions between schools and services on children’s behalf being reasonable, and implementation of necessary support practices to remain in education. The right column, highlighted in green, is titled “School or classroom difficulties” and includes points like sharing with teachers by children or parents, opportunities to reset tests, and schools working together with families. Arrows from both columns point towards a central box labelled “Delayed support,” indicating that both breakdowns in school placement and school or classroom difficulties can lead to delayed support, which may result from insufficient communication by the local education department. This flowchart visually represents the complexities of educational stability for children and underscores the importance of timely support and communication between families, schools, and local services.

The framework is not designed to prevent families from moving from school to home education. Rather, it can provide a lens to understand families’ experiences and meet institutional, professional and ethical responsibilities. As well as promoting inclusive practice, the framework can inform the development of policy to support systemic culture change. A local authority advisor could foster trust through improved understanding and inclusion at a local level across education, health and care. Where requested, the advisor should offer support for new or established home educators: with referrals, in their developing practice, and to access exams through working collaboratively with children, young people and their families.

Potential use in practice:

• Schools can consider and develop their responses to children’s school difficulties and ensure they work in partnership with families to avoid conflict and improve children’s experiences.
• Local authorities and professionals in education, health and care can recognise children’s negative school experiences, and work to improve their provision accordingly.
• When children and young people deregister from schools, the framework can be adopted to ensure that children’s and young people’s access to services is equitable and not interrupted.
• Families already understand the source of their conflict with schools, but they might use the framework to communicate and negotiate with schools and services.

Key messages for policymakers

At a four nations policy level, the study’s recommendations include:

• Specific, ongoing training in inclusive practice, working in partnership with children and their families for those working in education.
• To help schools and education departments better understand children’s, young people’s and families’ needs, a local authority role might be developed to bring consistency to approaches to home education currently in place.
• This advisor role could be undertaken by an inclusion specialist with experience in alternative, informal and/or community education.