I never thought I’d say this, but now I understand the appeal of homeschooling Emma Brooks

IIf you want to get rich, a friend recently told me, start an exam center. We were talking about her decision to homeschool — or unschool, or homeschool, depending on your tribal affiliation — her two children, making it both part of a broader trend and also somewhat foreign to her. The cliché of homeschooling still rests on the idea of ​​a marginal choice made by intolerant parents who produce a socially poor child – if you say of a child, “They are homeschooling,” you are giving off a knowing look that implies, “Say no more.”

Well, maybe, that’s all changing. Home schooling is still marginal, but its numbers are rising. In 2024, the UK Councils received 66,000 notifications Of children transitioning to home schooling, more than double the number compared to 2020 and Subtract the sum For about 111,700 children in England. Given there are nearly 9 million school-age children in England alone, this is still a small percentage. But the jump — which is subject to large regional fluctuations: The number of homeschooled children has more than tripled in the Northeast, and the number of homeschoolers has more than tripled. increased by 85% In the East of England – which is significant, not least because it seems to involve families who in a million years would not have imagined themselves taking this route.

I spoke to two parents, one in London, one in Yorkshire, both of whom took their children into homeschooling after or near the end of primary school, both of whom love it, if shyly, and neither of whom thinks it’s too difficult. Both are somewhat unusual, in that neither acted for religious or health reasons, or in response to the failure of poor provision for special educational needs and disabilities in state schools, which have traditionally been the primary incentives for withdrawing children from mainstream schools. I wanted to ask both of them: How can you bear this? Staying on the syllabus, never taking time off, and – mainly – teaching math, which supposedly requires you to do some math?

Tian Jones, in London, has a 14-year-old son who will be in ninth grade and a 10-year-old girl who will be finishing primary school. Instead, they are both at home, where Jones supervises their learning. Her eldest son left school after sixth year when he did not get into any of the sought-after secondary schools in a London borough where the options are not great. Her third-year daughter left a few years later after her son’s departure seemed to work. She is a single mother who runs her own business and can be flexible when she works. That’s the main thing about homeschooling, she says: It allows for a form of “focused learning” that lets you set your own schedule — in her family’s case, studying from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. on “school” days Monday through Wednesday, then taking a four-day weekend during which Jones works “crazy” at her actual job while the kids do clubs and extracurricular activities and all the things that Keep them in touch with their friends.

It’s the buddy thing that parents of kids in school tend to dismiss as a glaring downside of learning at home. How does a child learn to negotiate with difficult people, or weather conflicts, when they are in the same classroom? Parents I spoke to said that taking their children out of school does not mean giving up their friendships, and that with the right activities outside of school – Jones’ son goes to the orchestra on Saturday and she, cleverly, makes sure to organize get-togethers for him where he is involved with children he doesn’t particularly like – the same socialization can occur as within the school walls.

I mean it sounds like hell to me. But when I talked to Jones — who says that if her daughter feels like having a “reading day” or a “full cello day,” she goes ahead and allows it — I can see the appeal. Not everyone does. So strong are the feelings raised by people making choices for their children that you might not make yourself, that my friend in Yorkshire a) asks to remain anonymous and b) says she actually lost friends when she decided to homeschool her children. “It’s weird how hostile people are,” she says, and that’s before we get to the animosity between factions within the homeschooling world, some of which reject the term “homeschooling” because it emphasizes the word “school.” (“We’re not in that crowd,” she says dryly.)

They’re atypical in other ways too: her 15-year-old daughter and 19-year-old son are so enthusiastic that her son, already in his teens, bought all the textbooks himself, got up before 5am every day to study, pulled 10 GCSEs out of the garden a year early, and is now back in sixth form, where he is on track to get top grades for all his A-levels (He took some time before sixth grade to make sure that going back to school was what he wanted to do.) “He was a kid who loved ballet and the Brontës and hated football — he wasn’t cut out for high school,” says my friend, an artist married to a teacher. Meanwhile, her daughter was “quiet at school” but thrived at home, combining passing the curriculum with a day of dance and youth theater weekly. “I’m upstairs drawing,” my friend says as her kids actively self-teach between textbooks, YouTube videos, and the occasional math tutor.

I couldn’t do that. I think I know this about myself. During the pandemic, when I was on deadline to finish writing a book, my five-year-olds spent about six weeks on TikTok and didn’t do any of their school worksheets. If you’re a corporate lawyer or someone who works shifts in retail, this can’t be done without outside help as well. But if you can make it happen, Jones says, “it’s less stressful than school. My favorite day is Thursday, which is ‘well day,’ when we clean the house, the kids cook, we talk and relax.” When my friend in Yorkshire took her children out of school for the first time, she felt guilty and panicked. “Oh my God, what should I do?” But here’s what I’ve discovered: If your kids don’t “fit the mold,” there is another option, and it’s not as hard as you think.

“There’s more time to survive,” she says of the way they’ve figured things out — and that includes the one thing parents with kids in school only dream of: having semester vacations at a fraction of the cost.